N 



•• ' '('■' 






«cr: fee 

<.<" c < 



c < 

CC «p 

&& .. <^bt " - .<&<- c« 
zr"^^^ cc c 
c c£ cc <* 

"«■; . <sf<r c c ■" _« 

c <«c^ct <$— 

c cc cc or 

zc cc eC 

c cc ex . 



5 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. '] 



Shelf "... .A-A- 




UNITED STATES OF AMERiCA. * 



ci<^ 

c c 

c c 
c^c: 

< c 

< <_ 

CC 

CC 

CC 
c c 

CC 
c C 



<ST cC<H 
ace « 



:: t,-cl.«cr 



CC 

cc< • < 






4T <r <r cc c 



d <Z <L_ <c <c o < cj <c 



' ^ 


ft 


«__ ^ 


\L* «X~ 


■+ 


*r< 


Z": c<~ 


~ *: 






«1 


« 




dd 


<CZ 










if«l 


c:<r 


<«er< 


«*|g 


CC 


<§CZz 


<§£ «aC: 


£ «c<: 


~' oc 


3CT- <I3 


<Z«C 


<§ez 


< *C 


CC 


: <§cz 


<.•<■- «c 


T <:. < 


£: «§c: 


S «3 


<JC 


«tl c 


<c <c: 


ex: 


«cz 


:c «; 


^cc 


*K 


cc « 


oc 


<rc^ 


m ^2 


:1C 


C<CZ < 


mi *c 


ZCC 




m ^ 


_C<C~ 


c<zz 


cc « 


CT&c 




<1C 


r~«cg5f< 


:oc 


<r<r < 


^zee 




<xz <j 


^<Z 


ccr-- 


«Lcc 


<3Cl 


OC « 


dec 


ccz 


<XL_ 


<S£ 


cc 


<X1 


«c:c 


<C <c<2 


CKT 


<3S 


zee 




<Cc< 


zc<zz 


«cT< 


«3 


:/.ecc 


cc 


<g: 


^COC" 


<K 


<c< 


:CQC 


<^7<CL 


:<i <r 


<c ^tr 


<z<c 


<tc( 


: c<r * 


<ccr 


<CCc 


MS 


-«SjC 
<3Z 


<t : 


cr c c: 


'" - « 


CcC ""■ 




- <2? 


: C CC 


<dc 


' <c 


(C r C ' 


<r<r 


c 


£<XZ - 



_ CC 


C< € 


r:\csc -^ 


f <t •■: 


*c.<- ^<J 


■ <<2. 


r <<:' 


-■' c: 


t <cr 


:--<C:' 


5-- c - - - <scr 


T c/<C 


>_> ... *&ZHZ'} 


:<CX 


^!^^C 


;<ZZ 


^K2T 




" . «sz 


I «C ; 


«c 


CC c 


:c ^ <^r 


_ c .o 


-cr <: - «§r 





<clccz_. c<-'c 



/ 



THE 



QUEEN OF THE AIR 



BEING 



A STUDY OF THE GREEK MYTHS 



OF 



CLOUD AND STORM. 



BY 



JOHN RUSKIN, LL.D. 



SECOND EDITION 






LONDON: 
SMITH, ELDER & CO., 15, WATERLOO PLACE. 

1869. 



[The Right of Translation is reserved.'] 



A, 



PREFACE 



My days and strength have lately been much 
broken ; and I never more felt the insufficiency of 
both than in preparing for the press the following 
desultory memoranda on a most noble subject 
But I leave them now as they stand, for no time 
nor labour would be enough to complete them 
to my contentment ; and I believe that they contain 
suggestions which may be followed with safety, by 
persons who are beginning to take interest in the 
aspects of mythology, which only recent investi- 
gation has removed from the region of conjecture 
into that of rational inquiry. I have some advan- 
tage, also, from my field work, in the interpretation 
of myths relating to natural phenomena ; and I 
have had always near me, since we were at college 



iv Preface. 

together, a sure, and unweariedly kind, guide, in 
my friend Charles Newton, to whom we owe the 
finding of more treasure in mines of marble, than, 
were it rightly estimated, all California could buy. 
I must not, however, permit the chance of his name 
being in any wise associated with my errors. Much 
of my work has been done obstinately in my own 
way; and he is never responsible for me, though 
he has often kept me right, or at least enabled me 
to advance in a right direction. Absolutely right 
no one can be in such matters ; nor does a day 
pass without convincing every honest student of 
antiquity of some partial error, and showing him 
better how to think, and where to look. But I 
knew that there was no hope of my being able to 
enter with advantage on the fields of history opened 
by the splendid investigation of recent philologists ; 
though I could qualify myself, by attention and 
sympathy, to understand, here and there, a verse of 
Homer's or Hesiod's, as the simple people did for 
whom they sang. 

Even while I correct these sheets for press, a 
lecture by Professor Tyndall has been put into my 
hands which I ought to have heard last 16th of 



Preface. v 

January, but was hindered by mischance ; and which, 
I now find, completes, in two important particulars, 
the evidence of an instinctive truth in ancient sym- 
bolism ; showing, first, that the Greek conception of 
an setherial element pervading space is justified by 
the closest reasoning of modern physicists ; and, 
secondly, that the blue of the sky, hitherto thought 
to be caused by watery vapour, is, indeed, reflected 
from the divided air itself; so that the bright blue 
of the eyes of Athena, and the deep blue of her aegis, 
prove to be accurate mythic expressions of natural 
phenomena which it is an uttermost triumph of recent 
science to have revealed. 

Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine triumph 
more complete. To form, " within an experimental 
tube, a bit of more perfect sky than the sky itself! " 
here is magic of the finest sort ! singularly reversed 
from that of old time, which only asserted its com- 
petency to enclose in bottles elemental forces that 
were — not of the sky. 

Let me, in thanking Professor Tyndall for the 
true wonder of this piece of work, ask his pardon, 
and that of all masters in physical science, for any 
words of mine, either in the following pages or 



vi Preface. 

elsewhere, that may ever seem to fail in the 
respect due to their great powers of thought, or 
in the admiration due to the far scope of their dis- 
covery. But I will be judged by themselves, if I 
have not bitter reason to ask them to teach us 
more than yet they have taught. 

This first day of May, 1869, I am writing 
where my work was begun thirty-five years ago, — 
within sight of the snows of the higher Alps. In 
that half of the permitted life of man, I have seen 
strange evil brought upon every scene that I best 
loved, or tried to make beloved by others. The 
light which once flushed those pale summits with 
its rose at dawn, and purple at sunset, is now 
umbered and faint ; the air which once inlaid 
the clefts of all their golden crags with azure, is 
now defiled with languid coils of smoke, belched 
from worse than volcanic fires ; their very glacier 
waves are ebbing, and their snows fading, as if 
Hell had breathed on them ; the waters that once 
sank at their feet into crystalline rest, are now 
dimmed and foul, from deep to deep, and shore 
to shore. These are no careless words— they are 
accurately — horribly— true. I know what the Swiss 



Preface. vii 

lakes were ; no pool of Alpine fountain at its 
source was clearer. This morning, on the Lake of 
Geneva, at half a mile from the beach, I could 
scarcely see my oar-blade a fathom deep. 

The light, the air, the waters, all defiled ! How 
of the earth itself? Take this one fact for type of 
honour done by the modern Sw T iss to the earth of 
his native land. There used to be a little rock at 
the end of the avenue by the port of Neuchatel ; 
there, the last marble of the foot of Jura, sloping 
to the blue water, and (at this time of year) covered 
with bright pink tufts of Saponaria. I went, three 
days since, to gather a blossom at the place. The 
goodly native rock and its flowers were covered 
with the dust and refuse of the town ; but, in the 
middle of the avenue, was a newly-constructed arti- 
ficial rockery, with a fountain twisted through a 
spinning spout, and an inscription on one of its 
loose-tumbled stones, — - 

" Aux Botanistes, 
Le club Jurassique." 

Ah, masters of modern science, give me back my 
Athena out of your vials, and seal, if it may be, 
once more, Asmodeus therein, You have divided 



viii Preface. 

the elements, and united them ; enslaved them 
upon the earth, and discerned them in the stars. 
Teach us, now, but this of them, which is all that 
man need know, — that the Air is given to him for 
his life ; and the Rain to his thirst, and for his 
baptism ; and the Fire for warmth ; and the Sun 
for sight ; and the Earth for his meat — and his 
Rest. 

Vevay, May I, 1869. 



THE QUEEN OF THE AIR. 



i. 

ATHENA CHALINITXS.* 

{Athena in the Heavens) 

Lecture on the Greek Myths of Storm, given {pa?'tly,) in University College, 
London, March gth, 1869. 

I. I WILL not ask your pardon for endeavouring 
to interest you in the subject of Greek Mythology ; 
but I must ask your permission to approach it in a 
temper differing from that in which it is frequently 
treated. We cannot justly interpret the religion of 
any people, unless we are prepared to admit that we 
ourselves, as well as they, are liable to error in matters 
of faith ; and that the convictions of others, however 
singular, may in some points have been well founded, 
while our own, however reasonable, may in some 
particulars be mistaken. You must forgive me, there- 

* " Athena the Restrainer." The name is given to her as having 
helped Bellerophon to bridle Pegasus, the flying cloud. 

I 



2 The Queen of the Air. 

fore, for not always distinctively calling the creeds 
of the past, " superstition,'' and the creeds of the 
present day " religion ; " as well as for assuming that 
a faith now confessed may sometimes be superficial, 
and that a faith long forgotten may once have been 
sincere. It is the task of the Divine to condemn 
the errors of antiquity, and of the Philologist to 
account for them : I will only pray you to read, 
with patience, and human sympathy, the thoughts of 
men who lived without blame in a darkness they 
could not dispel ; and to remember that, whatever 
charge of folly may justly attach to the saying,— 
" There is no God," the folly is prouder, deeper, and 
less pardonable, in saying, " There is no God but 
for me." 

2. A Myth, in its simplest definition, is a story with 
a meaning attached to it, other than it seems to have 
at first ; and the fact that it has such a meaning is 
generally marked by some of its circumstances being 
extraordinary, or, in the common use of the word, 
unnatural. Thus, if I tell you that Hercules killed a 
water-serpent in the lake of Lerna, and if I mean, and 
you understand, nothing more than that fact, the 
story, whether true or false, is not a myth. But if by 
telling you this, I mean that Hercules purified the 
stagnation of many streams from deadly miasmata, 
my story, however simple, is a true myth ; only, as, 



Athena in the Heavens. 3 

if I left it in that simplicity, you would probably 
look for nothing beyond, it will be wise in me to 
surprise your attention by adding some singular cir- 
cumstance ; for instance, that the water-snake had 
several heads, which revived as fast as they were 
killed, and which poisoned even the foot that trode 
upon them as they slept. And in proportion to the 
fulness of intended meaning I shall probably multiply 
and refine upon these improbabilities ; as, suppose, 
if, instead of desiring only to tell you that Hercules 
purified a marsh, I wished you to understand that 
he contended with the venom and vapour of envy 
and evil ambition, whether in other men's souls or in 
his own, and choked that malaria only by supreme 
toil, — I might tell you that this serpent was formed 
by the Goddess whose pride was in the trial of 
Hercules ; and that its place of abode was by a 
palm-tree ; and that for every head of it that was 
cut off, two rose up with renewed life ; and that the 
hero found at last he could not kill the creature at 
all by cutting its heads off or crushing them ; but 
only by burning them down ; and that the midmost of 
them could not be killed even that way, but had to be 
buried alive. Only in proportion as I mean more, I 
shall certainly appear more absurd in my statement ; 
and at last, when I get unendurably significant, all 
practical persons will agree that I was talking mere 



4 The Queen of the Air. 

nonsense from the beginning, and never meant any- 
thing at all. 

3. It is just possible, however, also, that the story- 
teller may all along have meant nothing but what 
he said ; and that, incredible as the events may 
appear, he himself literally believed— and expected 
you also to believe — all this about Hercules, without 
any latent moral or history whatever. And it is very 
necessary, in reading traditions of this kind, to deter- 
mine, first of all, whether you are listening to a 
simple person, who is relating what, at all events^ 
he believes to be true (and may, therefore, possibly 
have been so to some extent), or to a reserved 
philosopher, who is veiling a theory of the universe 
under the grotesque of a fairy tale. It is, in general, 
more likely that the first supposition should be the 
right one :— simple and credulous persons are, perhaps 
fortunately, more common than philosophers : and it 
is of the highest importance that you should take 
their innocent testimony as it was meant, and not 
efface, under the graceful explanation which your 
cultivated ingenuity may suggest, either the evidence 
their story may contain (such as it is worth) of an 
extraordinary event having really taken place, or the 
unquestionable light which it will cast upon the 
character of the person by whom it was frankly 
believed. And to deal with Greek religion honestly, 



Athe7ia in the Heavens. 5 

you must at once understand that this literal belief 
was, in the mind of the general people, as deeply 
rooted as ours in the legends of our own sacred 
book ; and that a basis of unmiraculous event was as 
little suspected, and an explanatory symbolism as 
rarely traced, by them, as by us. 

You must, therefore, observe that I deeply degrade 
the position which such a myth as that just referred 
to occupied in the Greek mind, by comparing it (for 
fear of offending you) to our story of St. George 
and the Dragon. Still, the analogy is perfect in 
minor respects ; and though it fails to give you any 
notion of the vitally religious earnestness of the Greek 
faith, it will exactly illustrate the manner in which 
faith laid hold of its objects. 

4. This story of Hercules and the Hydra, then, 
was to the general Greek mind, in its best days, a 
tale about a real hero and a real monster. Not one 
in a thousand knew anything of the way in which 
the story had arisen, any more than the English 
peasant generally is aware of the plebeian origin of 
St. George ; or supposes that there were once alive in 
the world, with sharp teeth and claws, real, and very 
ugly, flying dragons. On the other hand, few persons 
traced any moral or symbolical meaning in the story, 
and the average Greek was as far from imagining any 
interpretation like that I have just given you, as an 



6 The Queen of the Air. 

average Englishman is from seeing in St. George the 
Red Cross Knight of Spenser, or in the Dragon the 
Spirit of Infidelity. But, for all that, there was a 
certain under-current of consciousness in all minds, 
that the figures meant more than they at first showed; 
and, according to each man's own faculties of senti- 
ment, he judged and read them ; just as a Knight 
of the Garter reads more in the jewel on his collar 
than the George and Dragon of a public-house 
expresses to the host or to his customers. Thus, 
to the mean person the myth always meant little ; 
to the noble person, much : and the greater their 
familiarity with it, the more contemptible it became 
to the one, and the more sacred to the other : until 
vulgar commentators explained it entirely away, 
while Virgil made it the crowning glory of his choral 
hymn to Hercules : 

" Around thee, powerless to infect thy soul, 
Rose, in his crested crowd, the Lerna worm." 

* ' Non te rationis egentem 
Lernaeus turba. capitum circumstetit anguis." 

And although, in any special toil of the hero's life, 
the moral interpretation was rarely with definiteness 
attached to its event, yet in the whole course of the 
life, not only a symbolical meaning, but the warrant 
for the existence of a real spiritual power, was appre- 
hended of all men. Hercules was no dead hero, to 



Athena in the Heavens. 7 

be remembered only as a victor over monsters of the 
past — harmless now, as slain. He was the perpetual 
type and mirror of heroism, and its present and 
living aid against every ravenous form of human trial 
and pain. 

5. But, if we seek to know more than this, and to 
ascertain the manner in which the story first crys- 
tallized into its shape, we shall find ourselves led 
back generally to one or other of two sources — 
either to actual historical events, represented by the 
' fancy under figures personifying them ; or else to 
natural phenomena similarly endowed with life by the 
imaginative power, usually more or less under the in- 
fluence of terror. The historical myths we must leave 
the masters of history to follow ; they, and the events 
they record, being yet involved in great, though 
attractive and penetrable, mystery. But the stars, 
and hills, and storms are with us now, as they were 
with others of old ; and it only needs that we look at 
them with the earnestness of those childish eyes to 
understand the first words spoken of them by the 
children of men. And then, in all the most beautiful 
and enduring myths, we shall find, not only a literal 
story of a real person, — not only a parallel imagery 
of moral principle, — but an underlying worship of 
natural phenomena, out of which both have sprung, 
and in which both for ever remain rooted. Thus, from 



8 The Queen of the Air. 

the real sun, rising and setting ; — from the real atmo- 
sphere, calm in its dominion of unfading blue, and 
fierce in its descent of tempest, — the Greek forms 
first the idea of two entirely personal and corporeal 
gods, whose limbs are clothed in divine flesh, and 
whose brows are crownejd with divine beauty ; yet so 
real that the quiver rattles at their shoulder, and the 
chariot bends beneath their weight. And, on the 
other hand, collaterally with these corporeal images, 
and never for one instant separated from them, he 
conceives also two omnipresent spiritual influences, of 
which one illuminates, as the sun, with a constant 
fire, whatever in humanity is skilful and wise ; and 
the other, like the living air, breathes the calm of 
heavenly fortitude, and strength of righteous anger, 
into every human breast that is pure and brave. 

6. Now, therefore, in nearly every myth of im- 
portance, and certainly in every one of those of which 
I shall speak to-night, you have to discern these three 
structural parts — the root and the two branches : — - 
the root, in physical existence, sun, or sky, or cloud, 
or sea ; then the personal incarnation of that ; 
becoming a trusted and companionable deity, with 
whom you may walk hand in hand, as a child with 
its brother or its sister ; and, lastly, the moral sig- 
nificance of the image, which is in all the great myths 
eternally and beneficently true, 



Athena in the Heavens. 9 

7. The great myths ; that is to say, myths made 
by great people. For the first plain fact about myth- 
making is one which has been most strangely lost 
sight of,— that you cannot make a myth unless you 
have something to make it of. You cannot tell a 
secret which you don't know.. If the myth is about 
the sky, it must have been made by somebody who 
had looked at the sky. If the myth is about justice 
and fortitude, it must have been made by some one 
who knew what it was to be just or patient. Accord- 
ing to the quantity of understanding in the person 
will be the quantity of significance in his fable ; and 
the myth of a simple and ignorant race must neces- 
sarily mean little, because a simple and ignorant race 
have little to mean. So the great question in reading 
a story is always, not what wild hunter dreamed, or 
what childish race first dreaded it ; but what wise 
man first perfectly told, and what strong people first 
perfectly lived by it And the real meaning of any 
myth is that w T hich it has at the noblest age of the 
nation among w T hom it is current. The farther back 
you pierce, the less significance you will find, until 
you come to the first narrow thought, which, indeed, 
contains the germ of the accomplished tradition ; but 
only as the seed contains the flower. As the intelli- 
gence and passion of the race develope, they cling 
to and nourish their beloved and sacred legend ; leaf 



io The Queen of the Air. 

by leaf it expands under the touch of more pure 
affections, and more delicate imagination, until at 
last the perfect fable burgeons out into symmetry 
of milky stem, and honied bell. 

8. But through whatever changes it may pass, 
remember that our right reading of it is wholly 
dependent on the materials we have in our own 
minds for an intelligent answering sympathy. If it 
first arose among a people who dwelt under stain- 
less skies, and measured their journeys by ascending 
and declining stars, we certainly cannot read their 
story, if we have never seen anything above us in the 
day, but smoke ; nor anything round us in the night 
but candles. If the tale goes on to change clouds or 
planets into living creatures, — to invest them with fair 
forms — and inflame them with mighty passions, we 
can only understand the story of the human-hearted 
things, in so far as we ourselves take pleasure in 
the perfectness of visible form, or can sympathize, 
by an effort of imagination, with the strange people 
who had other loves than that of wealth, and other 
interests than those of commerce. And, lastly, if 
the myth complete itself to the fulfilled thoughts 
of the nation, by attributing to the gods, whom 
they have carved out of their fantasy, continual 
presence with their own souls ; and their every effort 
for good is finally guided by the sense of the 



A thena in the Heavens. 1 1 

companionship, the praise, and the pure will of 
Immortals, we shall be able to follow them into 
this last circle of their faith only in the degree in 
which the better parts of our own beings have been 
also stirred by the aspects of nature, or strengthened 
by her laws. It may be easy to prove that the 
ascent of Apollo in his chariot signifies nothing but 
the rising of the sun. But what does the sunrise 
itself signify to us ? If only languid return to frivolous 
amusement, or fruitless labour, it will, indeed, not be 
easy for us to conceive the pow r er, over a Greek, of 
the name of Apollo. But if, for us also, as for the 
Greek, the sunrise means daily restoration to the 
sense of passionate gladness and of perfect life — if 
it means the thrilling of new strength through every 
nerve, — the shedding over us of a better peace than 
the peace of night, in the power of the dawn, — and 
the purging of evil vision and fear by the baptism of 
its dew ; — if the sun itself is an influence, to us also, 
of spiritual good — and becomes thus in reality, not in 
imagination, to us also, a spiritual power, — we may 
then soon over-pass the narrow limit of conception 
which kept that power impersonal, and rise with the 
Greek to the thought of an angel who rejoiced as a 
strong man to run his course, whose voice, calling to 
life and to labour, rang round the earth, and whose 
going forth was to the ends of heaven. 



12 The Queen of the Air. 

9. The time, then, at which I shall take up for 
you, as well as I can decipher it, the tradition of 
the Gods of Greece, shall be near the beginning of 
its central and formed faith, — about 500 B.C., — a faith 
of which the character is perfectly represented by 
Pindar and ^Eschylus, who are both of them out- 
spokenly religious, and entirely sincere men ; while 
we may always look back to find the less developed 
thought of the preceding epoch given by Homer, in a 
more occult, subtle, half- instinctive and involuntary 
way. 

10. Now, at that culminating period of the Greek 
religion we find, under one governing Lord of all 
things, four subordinate elemental forces, and four 
spiritual powers living in them, and commanding them. 
The elements are of course the well-known four of the 
ancient world — the earth, the waters, the fire, and the 
air ; and the living powers of them are Demeter, the 
Latin Ceres ; Poseidon, the Latin Neptune ; Apollo, 
who has retained always his Greek name ; and Athena, 
the Latin Minerva. Each of these are descended 
from, or changed from, more ancient, and therefore 
more mystic deities of the earth and heaven, and of 
a finer element of aether supposed to be beyond the 
heavens ; * but at this time we find the four quite 

* And by modern science now also asserted, and with probability 
argued, to exist. 



Athena in the Heavens. 13 

definite, both in their kingdoms and in their per- 
sonalities. They are the rulers of the earth that we 
tread upon, and the air that we breathe ; and are with 
us as closely, in their vivid humanity, as the dust 
that they animate, and the winds that they bridle. I 
shall briefly define for you the range of their separate 
dominions, and then follow, as far as we have time, 
the most interesting of the legends which relate to 
the queen of the air. 

11. The rule of the first spirit, Demeter, the earth 
mother, is over the earth, first, as the origin of all 
life — the dust from whence we were taken : secondly, 
as the receiver of all things back at last into silence — ■ 
" Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." 
And, therefore, as the most tender image of this 
appearing and fading life, in the birth and fall of 
flowers, her daughter Proserpine plays in the fields 
of Sicily, and thence is torn away into darkness, and 
becomes the Queen of Fate— not merely of death, 
but of the gloom which closes over and ends, not 
beauty only, but sin ; and chiefly of sins the sin 
against the life she gave : so that she is, in her highest 
power, Persephone, the avenger and purifier of blood, 
- — " The voice of thy brother's blood cries to me out 
of the ground? Then, side by side with this queen 
of the earth, we find a demigod of agriculture by the 
plough— the lord of grain, or of the thing ground 



14 The Queen of the Air. 

by the mill. And it is a singular proof of the sim- 
plicity of Greek character at this noble time, that of 
all representations left to us of their deities by their 
art, few are so frequent, and none perhaps so beau- 
tiful, as the symbol of this spirit of agriculture. 

12. Then the dominant spirit of the element of 
water is Neptune, but subordinate to him are myriads 
of other water spirits, of whom Nereus is the chief, with 
Palaemon, and Leucothea, the "white lady" of the 
sea ; and Thetis, and nymphs innumerable, who, like 
her, could " suffer a sea change," while the river deities 
had each independent power, according to the precious- 
ness of their streams to the cities fed by them, — the 
" fountain Arethuse, and thou, honoured flood, smooth 
sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds." And, 
spiritually, this king of the waters is lord of the 
strength and daily flow of human life — he gives it 
material force and victory ; which is the meaning of 
the dedication of the hair, as the sign of the strength 
of life, to the river of the native land. 

13. Demeter, then, over the earth, and its giving 
and receiving of life. Neptune over the waters, and 
the flow and force of life, — always among the Greeks 
typified by the horse, which was to them as a crested 
sea-wave, animated and bridled. Then the third 
element, fire, has set over it two powers : over earthly 
fire, the assistant of human labour, is set Hephaestus, 



Athena in the Heavens. 15 

lord of all labour in which is the flush and the sweat 
of the brow ; and over heavenly fire, the source of 
day, is set Apollo, the spirit of all kindling, purify- 
ing, and illuminating intellectual wisdom ; each of 
these gods having also their subordinate or associated 
powers — servant, or sister, or companion muse. 

14. Then, lastly, we come to the myth which is to 
be our subject of closer inquiry — the story of Athena 
and of the deities subordinate to her. This great 
goddess, the Neith of the Egyptians, the Athena or 
Athenaia of the Greeks, and, with broken power, half 
usurped by Mars, the Minerva of the Latins, is, 
physically, the queen of the air ; having supreme 
power both over its blessing of calm, and wrath of 
storm ; and, spiritually, she is the queen of the breath 
of man, first of the bodily breathing which is life to 
his blood, and strength to his arm in battle ; and 
then of the mental breathing, or inspiration, which is 
his moral health and habitual wisdom ; wisdom of 
conduct and of the heart, as opposed to the wisdom of 
imagination and the brain ; moral, as distinct from 
intellectual ; inspired, as distinct from illuminated. 

15. By a singular, and fortunate, though I believe 
wholly accidental coincidence, the heart-virtue, of 
which she is the spirit, was separated by the ancients 
into four divisions, which have since obtained accept- 
ance from all men as rightly discerned, and have 



1 6 The Queen of the Air. 

received, as if from the quarters of the four winds of 
which Athena is the natural queen, the name of 
" Cardinal" virtues: namely, Prudence, (the right 
seeing, and foreseeing, of events through darkness) ; 
Justice, (the righteous bestowal of favour and of 
indignation) ; Fortitude, (patience under trial by- 
pain) ; and Temperance, (patience under trial by 
pleasure). With respect to these four virtues, the 
attributes of Athena are all distinct. In her 
prudence, or sight in darkness, she is " Glaukopis," 
" owl-eyed." * In her justice, which is the dominant 
virtue, she wears two robes, one of light and one of 
darkness ; the robe of light, saffron colour, or the 
colour of the daybreak, falls to her feet, covering her 
wholly with favour and love,— the calm of the sky in 
blessing : it is embroidered along its edge with her 
victory over the giants, (the troublous powers of the 
earth,) and the likeness of it was woven yearly by 
the Athenian maidens and carried to the temple of 
their own Athena, — not to the Parthenon, that was 
the temple of all the world's Athena, — but this they 
carried to the temple of their own only one, who 
loved them, and stayed with them always. Then her 
robe of indignation is worn on her breast and left 
arm only, fringed with fatal serpents, and fastened 

* There are many other meanings in the epithet ; see, farther on, 
§ 9i> P. i°5- 



Athena in the Heavens. ly 

with Gorgonian cold, turning men to stone ; physically, 
the lightning and the hail of chastisement by storm. 
Then in her fortitude she wears the crested and un- 
stooping helmet ; * and lastly, in her temperance, she 
is the queen of maidenhood — stainless as the air of 
heaven. 

1 6. But all these virtues mass themselves in the 
Greek mind into the two main ones — of Justice, or 
noble passion, and Fortitude, or noble patience ; and 
of these, the chief powers of Athena, the Greeks had 
divinely written for them, and for all men after them, 
two mighty songs, — one, of the Menis,f mens, passion, 
or zeal, of Athena, breathed into a mortal whose name 
is "Ache of heart," and whose short life is only the 
incarnate brooding and burst of storm ; and the other 
is of the foresight and fortitude of Athena, main- 
tained by her in the heart of a mortal whose name is 
given to him from a longer grief, Odysseus, the full 
of sorrow, the much-enduring, and the long-suffering. 

17. The minor expressions by the Greeks in word, 
in symbol, and in religious service, of this faith, are 
so many and so beautiful, that I hope some day to 

* I am compelled, for clearness' sake, to mark only one meaning 
at a time. Athena's helmet is sometimes a mask — sometimes a sign 
of anger— sometimes of the highest light of aether : but I cannot speak 
of all this at once. 

+ This first word of the Iliad, Menis, afterwards passes into the 
Latin Mens ; is the root of the Latin name for Athena, "Minerva," and 
so of the English "mind." 

2 



1 8 The Queen of the Air. 

gather at least a few of them into a separate body of 
evidence respecting the power of Athena, and its 
relations to the ethical conception of the Homeric 
poems, or, rather, to their ethical nature ; for they 
are not conceived didactically, but are didactic in 
their essence, as all good art is. There is an increas- 
ing insensibility to this character, and even an open 
denial of it, among us, now, which is one of the most 
curious errors of modernism, — -the peculiar and judicial 
blindness of an age which, having long practised 
art and poetry for the sake of pleasure only, has 
become incapable of reading their language when 
they were both didactic : and also, having been itself 
accustomed to a professedly didactic teaching, which 
yet, for private interests, studiously avoids collision 
with every prevalent vice of its day, (and especially 
w r ith avarice), has become equally dead to the in- 
tensely ethical conceptions of a race which habitually 
divided all men into two broad classes of worthy or 
worthless ; — good, and good for nothing. And even 
the celebrated passage of Horace about the Iliad is 
now misread or disbelieved, as if it was impossible 
that the Iliad could be instructive because it is not 
like a sermon. Horace does not say that it is like a 
sermon, and would have been still less likely to say 
so, if he ever had had the advantage of hearing a 
sermon. " I have been reading that story of Troy 



Athena in the Heavens. 19 

again" (thus he writes to a noble youth of Rome 
whom he cared for), " quietly at Prseneste, while you 
have been busy at Rome ; and truly I think that 
what is base and what is noble, and what useful and 
useless, may be better learned from that, than from 
all Chrysippus' and Crantor's talk put together.''* 
Which is profoundly true, not of the Iliad only, but 
of all other great art whatsoever ; for all pieces of 
such art are didactic in the purest way, indirectly 
and occultly, so that, first, you shall only be bettered 
by them if you are already hard at work in bettering 
yourself ; and when you are bettered by them, it shall 
be partly with a general acceptance of their influence, 
so constant and subtle that you shall be no more 
conscious of it than of the healthy digestion of food ; 
and partly by a gift of unexpected truth, which you 
shall only find by slow mining for it ; — which is with- 
held on purpose, and close-locked, that you may not 
get it till you have forged the key of it in a furnace 
of your own heating. And this withholding of their 
meaning is continual, and confessed, in the great 
poets. Thus Pindar says of himself : " There is 
many an arrow in my quiver, full of speech to 
the wise, but, for the many, they need interpreters." 

* Note, once for all, that unless when there is question about some 
particular expression, I never translate literally, but give the real force 
of what is said, as I best can, freely. 



20 The Queen of the Air. 

And neither Pindar, nor iEschylus, nor Hesiod, nor 
Homer, nor any of the greater poets or teachers of 
any nation or time, ever spoke but with intentional 
reservation : nay, beyond this, there is often a mean- 
ing which they themselves cannot interpret,-— which it 
may be for ages long after them to interpret, — in what 
they said, so far as it recorded true imaginative vision. 
For all the greatest myths have been seen, by the men 
who tell them, involuntarily and passively, — seen by 
them with as great distinctness (and in some respects, 
though not in all, under conditions as far beyond the 
control of their will) as a dream sent to any of us 
by night when we dream clearest ; and it is this 
veracity of vision that could not be refused, and of 
moral that could not be foreseen, which in modern 
historical inquiry has been left wholly out of account : 
being indeed the thing which no merely historical 
investigator can understand, or even believe ; for it 
belongs exclusively to the creative or artistic group 
of men, and can only be interpreted by those of their 
race, who themselves in some measure also see visions 
and dream dreams, 

So that you may obtain a more truthful idea of 
the nature of Greek religion and legend from the 
poems of Keats, and the nearly as beautiful, and, in 
general grasp of subject, far more powerful, recent 
work of Morris, than from frigid scholarship, however 



Athena in the Heavens. 21 

extensive. Not that the poet's impressions or ren- 
derings of things are wholly true, but their truth is 
vital, not formal. They are like sketches from the 
life by Reynolds or Gainsborough, v which may be 
demonstrably inaccurate or imaginary in many traits, 
and indistinct in others, yet will be in the deepest 
sense like, and true ; while the work of historical 
analysis is too often weak with loss, through the very 
labour of its miniature touches, or useless in clumsy 
and vapid veracity of externals, and complacent 
security of having done all that is required for the 
portrait, when it has measured the breadth of the 
forehead, and the length of the nose. 

18. The first of requirements, then, for the right 
reading of myths, is the understanding of the nature 
of all true vision by noble persons ; namely, that it 
is founded on constant laws common to all human 
nature ; that it perceives, however darkly, things 
which are for all ages true; — that we can only 
understand it so far as we have some perception of 
the same truth ; — and that its fulness is developed 
and manifested more and more by the reverbera- 
tion of it from minds of the same mirror-temper, 
in succeeding ages. You will understand Homer 
better by seeing his reflection in Dante, as you 
may trace new forms and softer colours in a hill- 
side, redoubled by a lake. 



22 The Queen of the Air. 

I shall be able partly to show you, even to- 
night, how much, in the Homeric vision of Athena, 
has been made clearer by the advance of time, 
being thus essentially and eternally true ; but I 
must in the outset indicate the relation to that 
central thought of the imagery of the inferior deities 
of storm. 

19. And first I will take the myth of ^Eolus, (the 
" sage Hippotades " of Milton,) as it is delivered pure 
by Homer from the early times. 

Why do you suppose Milton calls him " sage ? " 
One does not usually think, of the winds as very 
thoughtful or deliberate powers. But hear Homer : 
" Then we came to the ^Eolian island, and there dwelt 
y£olus Hippotades, dear to the deathless gods : there 
he dwelt in a floating island, and round it was a wall 
of brass that could not be broken ; and the smooth 
rock of it ran up sheer. To whom twelve children 
were born in the sacred chambers — six daughters and 
six strong sons ; and they dwell for ever with their 
beloved father, and their mother strict in duty ; and 
with them are laid up a thousand benefits ; and the 
misty house around them rings with fluting all the 
day long.'' Now, you are to note first, in this 
description, the wall of brass and the sheer rock. 
You will find, throughout the fables of the tempest- 
group, that the brazen wall and precipice (occurring 



Athena in the Heavens. 23 

iti another myth as the brazen tower of Danae) are 
always connected with the idea of the towering cloud 
lighted by the sun, here truly described as a floating 
island. Secondly, you hear that all treasures were 
laid up in them ; therefore, you know this .ZEolus is 
lord of the beneficent winds (" he bringeth the wind 
out of his treasuries"); and presently afterwards 
Homer calls him the "steward" of the winds, the 
master of the storehouse of them. And this idea 
of gifts and preciousness in the winds of heaven is 
carried out in the well-known sequel of the fable : — 
iEolus gives them to Ulysses, all but one, bound in 
leathern bags, with a glittering cord of silver ; and 
so like bags of treasure that the sailors think they 
are so, and open them to see. And when Ulysses is 
thus driven back to ^Eolus, and prays him again to 
help him, note the deliberate words of the King's 
refusal,—" Did I not," he says, "send thee on thy way 
heartily, that thou mightest reach thy country, thy 
home, and whatever is dear to thee ? It is not lawful 
for me again to send forth favourably on his journey 
a man hated by the happy gods." This idea of the 
beneficence of ^Eolus remains to the latest times, 
though Virgil, by adopting the vulgar change of the 
cloud island into Lipari, has lost it a little ; but 
even when it is finally explained away by Diodorus, 
^Eolus is still a kind-hearted monarch, who lived on 



24 The Queen of the Air. 

the coast of Sorrento, invented the use of sails, and 
established a system of storm signals. 

20. Another beneficent storm power, Boreas, 
occupies an important place in early legend, and a 
singularly principal one in art ; and I wish I could 
read to you a passage of Plato about the legend of 
Boreas and Oreithyia,* and the breeze and shade of 
the Ilissus — notwithstanding its severe reflection upon 
persons who waste their time on mythological studies : 
but I must go on at once to the fable with which you 
are all generally familiar, that of the Harpies. 

This is always connected with that of Boreas 
or the north wind, because the two sons of Boreas 
are enemies of the Harpies, and drive them away 
into frantic flight. The myth in its first literal form 
means only the battle between the fair north wind 
and the foul south one : the two Harpies, " Storm- 
swift " and " Swiftfoot," are the sisters of the rain- 
bow — that is to say, they are the broken drifts of 
the showery south wind, and the clear north wind 
drives them back ; but they quickly take a deeper 
and more malignant significance. You know the 
short, violent, spiral gusts that lift the dust before 
coming rain : the Harpies get identified first with 
these, and then with more violent whirlwinds, and so 

* Translated by Max Miiller in the opening of his essay on 
" Comparative Mythology." {Chips from a German Workshops vol. ii.) 



Athena in the Heavens. 25 

they are called " Harpies," " the Snatchers," and are 
thought of as entirely destructive ; their manner of 
destroying being twofold — by snatching away, and by 
defiling and polluting. This is a month in which you 
may really see a small Harpy at her work almost 
whenever you choose. The first time that there is 
threatening of rain after two or three days of fine 
weather, leave your window w r ell open to the street, 
and some books or papers on the table ; and if you 
do not, in a little while, know what the Harpies mean ; 
and how they snatch, and how they defile, I'll give up 
my Greek myths. 

21. That is the physical meaning. It is now easy 
to find the mental one. You must all have felt the 
expression of ignoble anger in those fitful gusts of 
sudden storm. There is a sense of provocation and 
apparent bitterness of purpose in their thin and sense- 
less fury, wholly different from the noble anger of 
the greater tempests. Also, they seem useless and 
unnatural, and the Greek thinks of them always as 
vile in malice, and opposed, therefore, to the sons of 
Boreas, who are kindly winds, that fill sails, and 
wave harvests, — full of bracing health and happy 
impulses. From this lower and merely malicious 
temper, the Harpies rise into a greater terror, always 
associated with their whirling motion, which is indeed 
indicative of the most destructive winds : and they 



26 The Queen of the Air. 

are thus related to the nobler tempests, as Charybdis 
to the sea ; they are devouring and desolating, merci- 
less, making all things disappear that come in their 
grasp : and so, spiritually, they are the gusts of 
vexatious, fretful, lawless passion, vain and over- 
shadowing, discontented and lamenting, meagre and 
insane, — spirits of wasted energy, and wandering dis- 
ease, and unappeased famine, and unsatisfied hope. 
So you have, on the one side, the winds of prosperity 
and health, on the other, of ruin and sickness. 
Understand that, once, deeply — any who have ever 
known the weariness of vain desires ; the pitiful, 
unconquerable, coiling and recoiling and self-involved 
returns of some sickening famine and thirst of heart : 
—and you will know what was in the sound of the 
Harpy Celseno's shriek from her rock ; and why, in 
the seventh circle of the " Inferno/' the Harpies make 
their nests in the warped branches of the trees that 
are the souls of suicides. 

22. Now you must always be prepared to read 
Greek legends as you trace threads through figures 
on a silken damask : the same thread runs through 
the web, but it makes part of different figures. Joined 
with other colours you hardly recognize it, and in 
different lights, it is dark or light. Thus the Greek 
fables blend and cross curiously in different directions, 
till they knit themselves into an arabesque where 



Athena in the Heavens. 27 

sometimes you cannot tell black from purple, nor 
blue from emerald — they being all the truer for this, 
because the truths of emotion they represent are 
interwoven in the same way, but all the more difficult 
to read, and to explain in any order. Thus the 
Harpies, as they represent vain desire, are connected 
with the Sirens, who are the spirits of constant desire : 
so that it is difficult sometimes in early art to know 
which are meant, both being represented alike as 
birds with women's heads ; only the Sirens are the 
great constant desires — the infinite sicknesses of 
heart — which, rightly placed, give life, and wrongly 
placed, waste it away ; so that there are two groups 
of Sirens, one noble and saving, as the other is fatal, 
But there are no animating or saving Harpies ; their 
nature is always vexing and full of weariness, and 
thus they are curiously connected with the whole 
group of legends about Tantalus. 

23. We all know what it is to be tantalized ; but 
we do not often think of asking what Tantalus was 
tantalized for — what he had done, to be for ever kept 
hungry in sight of food ? Well ; he had not been 
condemned to this merely for being a glutton. By 
Dante the same punishment is assigned to simple 
gluttony, to purge it away ; — but the sins of Tantalus 
were of a much wider and more mysterious kind. 
There are four great sins attributed to him — one, 



28 The Queen of the Air, 

stealing the food of the Gods to give it to men ; 
another, sacrificing his son to feed the Gods them- 
selves, (it may remind you for a moment of what I 
was telling you of the earthly character of Demeter, 
that, while the other Gods all refuse, she, dreaming 
about her lost daughter, eats part of the shoulder of 
Pelops before she knows what she is doing) ; another 
sin is, telling the secrets of the Gods ; and only the 
fourth — stealing the golden dog of Pandareos — is 
connected with gluttony. The special sense of this 
myth is marked by Pandareos receiving the happy 
privilege of never being troubled with indigestion ; 
the dog, in general, however, mythically represents all 
utterly senseless and carnal desires ; mainly that of 
gluttony ; and in the mythic sense of Hades — that is 
to say, so far as it represents spiritual ruin in this life, 
and not a literal hell — the dog Cerberus is its gate- 
keeper — with this special marking of his character of 
sensual passion, that he fawns on all those who descend, 
but rages against all who would return, (the Virgilian 
" facilis descensus " being a later recognition of this 
mythic character of Hades :) the last labour of Hercules 
is the dragging him up to the light ; and in some sort, 
he represents the voracity or devouring of Hades itself ; 
and the mediaeval representation of the mouth of hell 
perpetuates the same thought. Then, also, the power 
of evil passion is partly associated with the red and 



Athena in the Heavens. 29 

scorching light of Sirius, as opposed to the pure light 
of the sun : — he is the dog-star of ruin ; and hence the 
continual Homeric dwelling upon him, and comparison 
of the flame of anger to his swarthy light ; only, in 
his scorching, it is thirst, not hunger, over which he 
rules physically ; so that the fable of Icarius, his first 
master, corresponds, among the Greeks, to the legend 
of the drunkenness of Noah. 

The story of Actseon, the raging death of Hecuba, 
and the tradition of the white dog which ate part of 
Hercules' first sacrifice, and so gave name to the 
Cynosarges, are all various phases of the same 
thought— the Greek notion of the dog being throughout 
confused between its serviceable fidelity, its watchful- 
ness, its foul voracity, shamelessness, and deadly 
madness, while, with the curious reversal or recoil of 
the meaning which attaches itself to nearly every great 
myth — and which we shall presently see notably 
exemplified in the relations of the serpent to Athena, 
— the dog becomes in philosophy a type of severity 
and abstinence. 

24. It w r ould carry us too far aside were I to tell 
you the story of Pandareos' dog — -or rather, of Jupiter's 
dog, for Pandareos was its guardian only ; all that 
bears on our present purpose is that the guardian of 
this golden dog had three daughters, one of whom was 
subject to the power of the Sirens, and is turned into 



30 The Queen of the Air. 

the nightingale ; and the other two were subject to 
the power of the Harpies, and this was what happened 
to them. They were very beautiful, and they were 
beloved by the gods in their youth, and all the great 
goddesses were anxious to bring them up rightly. 
Of all types of young ladies' education, there is 
nothing so splendid as that of the younger daughters 
of Pandareos. They have literally the four greatest 
goddesses for their governesses. Athena teaches 
them domestic accomplishments ; how to weave, and 
sew, and the like ; Artemis teaches them to hold them- 
selves up straight ; Hera, how to behave proudly and 
oppressively to company ; and Aphrodite — delightful 
governess — feeds them with cakes and honey all day 
long. All goes well, until just the time when they 
are going to be brought out ; then there is a great 
dispute whom they are to marry, and in the midst 
of it they are carried off by the Harpies, given by 
them to be slaves to the Furies, and never seen more. 
But of course there is nothing in Greek myths ; and 
one never heard of such things as vain desires, 
and empty hopes, and clouded passions, defiling 
and snatching away the souls of maidens, in a 
London season. 

I have no time to trace for you any more harpy 
legends, though they are full of the most curious 
interest ; but I may confirm for you my interpre- 



Athena in the Heavens. 31 

tation of this one, and prove its importance in the 
Greek mind, by noting that Polygnotus painted these 
maidens, in his great religious series of paintings at 
Delphi, crowned with flowers, and playing at dice ; 
and that Penelope remembers them in her last fit of 
despair, just before the return of Ulysses ; and prays 
bitterly that she may be snatched away at once into 
nothingness by the Harpies, like Pandareos' daughters, 
rather than be tormented longer by her deferred hope, 
and anguish of disappointed love. 

25. I have hitherto spoken only of deities of the 
winds. We pass now to a far more important group, 
the Deities of Cloud. Both of these are subordinate 
to the ruling power of the air, as the demigods of the 
fountains and minor seas are to the great deep : but, as 
the cloud-firmament detaches itself more from the air, 
and has a wider range of ministry than the minor 
streams and seas, the highest cloud deity, Hermes, 
has a rank more equal with Athena than Nereus or 
Proteus with Neptune ; and there is greater difficulty 
in tracing his character, because his physical dominion 
over the clouds can, of course, be asserted only where 
clouds are ; and, therefore, scarcely at all in Egypt :* so 

* I believe that the conclusions of recent scholarship are generally 

opposed to the Herodotean ideas of any direct acceptance by the Greeks 

• of Egyptian myths : and very certainly, Greek art is developed by giving 

the veracity and simplicity of real life to Eastern savage grotesque ; and 

not by softening the severity of pure Egyptian design. But it is of no 



32 The Queen of the Air. 

that the changes which Hermes undergoes in becoming 
a Greek from an Egyptian and Phoenician god, are 
greater than in any other case of adopted tradition. 
In Egypt Hermes is a deity of historical record, and 
a conductor of the dead to judgment ; the Greeks 
take away much of this historical function, assigning 
it to the Muses ; but, in investing him with the 
physical power over clouds, they give him that which 
the Muses disdain, the power of concealment, and of 
theft. The snatching away by the Harpies is with 
brute force ; but the snatching away by the clouds is 
connected with the thought of hiding, and of making 
things seem to be what they are not ; so that Hermes 
is the god of lying, as he is of mist ; and yet with 
this ignoble function of making things vanish and 
disappear, is connected the remnant of his grand 
Egyptian authority of leading away souls in the cloud 
of death (the actual dimness of sight caused by mortal 
wounds physically suggesting the darkness and descent 
of clouds, and continually being so described in the 
Iliad) ; while the sense of the need of guidance on 
the untrodden road follows necessarily. You cannot 
but remember how this thought of cloud guidance, 
and cloud receiving of souls at death, has been else- 
where ratified. 

consequence whether one conception was, or was not, in this case, 
derived from the other ; my object is only to mark the essential differ- 
ences between them. 



Athena in the Heavens. 33 

26. Without following that higher clue, I will pass 
to the lovely group of myths connected with the birth 
of Hermes on the Greek mountains. You know that 
the valley of Sparta is one of the noblest mountain 
ravines in the world, and that the western flank of it 
is formed by an unbroken chain of crags, forty miles 
long, rising, opposite Sparta, to a height of 8,000 feet, 
and known as the chain of Taygetus. Now, the 
nymph from whom that mountain ridge is named, 
was the mother of Lacedsemon ; therefore, the mythic 
ancestress of the Spartan race. She is the nymph 
Taygeta, and one of the seven stars of spring ; one of 
those Pleiades of whom is the question to Job, — 
" Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or 
loose the bands of Orion ? " " The sweet influences of 
Pleiades," of the stars of spring, — nowhere sweeter 
than among the pine-clad slopes of the hills of Sparta 
and Arcadia, when the snows of their higher summits, 
beneath the sunshine of April, fell into fountains, and 
rose into clouds ; and in every ravine was a newly- 
awakened voice of waters, — soft increase of whisper 
among its sacred stones : and on every crag its form- ? 
ing and fading veil of radiant cloud ; temple above • 
temple, of the divine marble that no tool can pollute, , 
nor ruin undermine. And, therefore, beyond this 
central valley, this great Greek vase of Arcadia, on 
the " hollow " mountain, Cyllene, or " pregnant " 

3 



34 The Queen of the Air. 

mountain, called also " cold/' because there the 
vapours rest,* and born of the eldest of those stars 
of spring, that Maia, from whom your own month of 
May has its name, bringing to you, in the green 
of her garlands, and the white of her hawthorn, the 
unrecognized symbols of the pastures and the wreathed 
snows of Arcadia, where long ago she was queen of 
stars : there, first cradled and wrapt in swaddling- 
clothes ; then raised, in a moment of surprise, into 
his wandering power, — is born the shepherd of the 
clouds, winged-footed and deceiving,— blinding the 
eyes of Argus,— escaping from the grasp of Apollo 
— restless messenger between the highest sky and 
topmost earth — " the herald Mercury, new lighted 
on a heaven-kissing hill." 

27. Now, it will be wholly impossible, at present, 
to trace for you any of the minor Greek expressions 
of this thought, except only that Mercury, as the 
cloud shepherd, is especially called Eriophoros, the 
wool-bearer. You will recollect the name from the 
common woolly rush " eriophorum " which has a cloud 
of silky seed ; and note also that he wears distinctively 
the flat ca,p,petasos, named from a word meaning to 
expand ; which shaded from the sun, and is worn 

* On the altar of Hermes on its summit, as on that of the Lacinian 
Hera, no wind ever stirred the ashes. By those altars, the Gods of 
Heaven were appeased ; and all their storms at rest. 



Athena in the Heavens, 35 

on journeys. You have the epithet of mountains 
" cloud-capped " as an established form with every 
poet, and the Mont Pilate of Lucerne is named from 
a Latin word signifying specially a woollen cap ; 
but Mercury has, besides, a general Homeric epithet, 
curiously and intensely concentrated in meaning, 
" the profitable or serviceable by wool," * that is 
to say, by shepherd wealth ; hence, " pecuniarily/' 
rich, or serviceable, and so he passes at last into a 
general mercantile deity ; while yet the cloud sense 
of the wool is retained by Homer always, so that 
he gives him this epithet when it would otherwise 
have been quite meaningless, (in Iliad, xxiv. 440,) 
when he drives Priam's chariot, and breathes force 
into his horses, precisely as we shall find Athena 
drive Diomed : and yet the serviceable and profitable 
sense, — and something also of gentle and soothing 
character in the mere wool-softness, as used for dress, 
and religious rites, — is retained also in the epithet, 
and thus the gentle and serviceable Hermes is 
opposed to the deceitful one. 

28. In connection with this driving of Priam's 
chariot, remember that as Autolycus is the son of 
Hermes the Deceiver, Myrtilus (the Auriga of the 

* I am convinced that the Ipi in sptovvtog is not intensitive ; but 
retained from epiov : but even if I am wrong in thinking this, the 
mistake is of no consequence with respect to the general force of the 
term as meaning the profitableness of Hermes. Athena's epithet of 
dyexeia has a parallel significance. 



36 The Queen of the Air. 

Stars) is the son of Hermes the Guide. The name 
Hermes itself means Impulse ; and he is especially 
the shepherd of the flocks of the sky, in driving, or 
guiding, or stealing them ; and yet his great name, 
Argeiphontes, not only— as in different passages of 
the olden poets- — means "Shining White, 7 ' which is 
said of him as being himself the silver cloud lighted 
by the sun ; but " Argus-Killer," the killer of bright- 
ness, which is said of him as he veils the sky, and 
especially the stars, which are the eyes of Argus ; 
or, literally, eyes of brightness, which Juno, who is, 
with Jupiter, part of the type of highest heaven, keeps 
in her peacock's train. We know that this interpre- 
tation is right, from a passage in which Euripides 
describes the shield of Hippomedon, which bore for 
its sign, " Argus the all-seeing, covered with eyes ; 
open towards the rising of the stars, and closed 
towards their setting." 

And thus Hermes becomes the spirit of the move- 
ment of the sky or firmament ; not merely the fast 
flying of the transitory cloud, but the great motion of 
the heavens and stars themselves. Thus, in his highest 
power, he corresponds to the " primo mobile " of the 
later Italian philosophy, and, in his simplest, is the 
guide of all mysterious and cloudy movement, and 
of all successful subtleties. Perhaps the prettiest 
minor recognition of his character is when, on the 



Athena in the Heavens. 37 

night foray of Ulysses and Diomed, Ulysses wears 
the helmet stolen by Autolycus, the son of Hermes. 

29. The position in the Greek mind of Hermes 
as the Lord of cloud is, however, more mystic and 
ideal than that of any other deity, just on account 
of the constant and real presence of the cloud itself 
under different forms, giving rise to all kinds of minor 
fables. The play of the Greek imagination in this 
direction is so wide and complex, that I cannot even 
give you an outline of its range in my present limits. 
There is first a great series of storm-legends connected 
with the family of the historic ^Eolus, centralized by 
the story of Athamas, with his two wives, "the 
Cloud " and the " White Goddess," ending in that 
of Phrixus and Helle, and of the golden fleece 
(which is only the cloud-burden of Hermes Erio- 
phoros). With this, there is the fate of Salmoneus, 
and the destruction of Glaucus by his own horses ; 
all these minor myths of storm concentrating them- 
selves darkly into the legend of Bellerophon and the 
Chimsera, in which there is an under story about the 
vain subduing of passion and treachery, and the end 
of life in fading melancholy,— which, I hope, not many 
of you could understand even were I to show it you : 
(the merely physical meaning of the Chimaera is the 
cloud of volcanic lightning, connected wholly with 
earth-fire, but resembling the heavenly cloud in its 



38 The Queen of the Air. 

height and its thunder). Finally, in the ^Eolic group, 
there is the legend of Sisyphus, which I mean to 
work out thoroughly by itself: its root is in the 
position of Corinth as ruling the isthmus and the 
two seas— the Corinthian Acropolis, two thousand feet 
high, being the centre of the crossing currents of the 
winds, and of the commerce of Greece. Therefore, 
Athena, and the fountain cloud Pegasus, are more 
closely connected with Corinth than even with Athens 
in their material, though not in their moral power ; 
and Sisyphus founds the Isthmian games in connec- 
tion with a melancholy story about the sea gods ; but 
he himself is ke^igtoq av^puv, the most " gaining " and 
subtle of men ; who, having the key of the Isthmus, 
becomes the type of transit, transfer, or trade, as 
such ; and of the apparent gain from it, which is not 
gain : and this is the real meaning of his punishment 
in hell — eternal toil and recoil (the modern idol of 
capital being, indeed, the stone of Sisyphus with a 
vengeance, crushing in its recoil). But, throughout, 
the old ideas of the cloud power and cloud feeble- 
ness, — the deceit of its hiding,— and the emptiness of 
its vanishing,— the Autolycus enchantment of making 
black seem white, — and the disappointed fury of 
Ixion (taking shadow for power), mingle in the moral 
meaning of this and its collateral legends ; and give 
an aspect, at last, not only of foolish cunning, but of 



Athena in the Heavens. 39 

impiety or literal " idolatry," " imagination worship/' 
to the dreams of avarice and injustice, until this 
notion of atheism and insolent blindness becomes 
principal ; and the " Clouds " of Aristophanes, with 
the personified "just" and "unjust" sayings in the 
latter part of the play, foreshadow, almost feature by 
feature, in all that they were written to mock and to 
chastise, the worst elements of the impious " Sivog " 
and tumult in men's thoughts, which have followed 
on their avarice in the present day, making them 
alike forsake the laws of their ancient gods, and mis- 
apprehend or reject the true words of their existing 
teachers. 

3O0 All this we have from the legends of the 
historic ^Eolus only ; but, besides these, there is the 
beautiful story of Semele, the mother of Bacchus, 
She is the cloud with the strength of the vine in its 
bosom, consumed by the light which matures the 
fruit ; the melting away of the cloud into the clear 
air at the fringe of its edges being exquisitely ren- 
dered by Pindar's epithet for her, Semele, "with the 
stretched-out hair" (rawiOeipa). Then there is the 
entire tradition of the Danaides, and of the tower of 
Danae and golden shower ; the birth of Perseus con- 
necting this legend with that of the Gorgons and 
Graise, who are the true clouds of thunderous and 
ruinous tempest I must, in passing, mark for you 



4-0 The Queen of the Air. 

that the form of the sword or sickle of Perseus, with 
which he kills Medusa, is another image of the whirl- 
ing harpy vortex, and belongs especially to the sword 
of destruction or annihilation ; whence it is given to 
the two angels who gather for destruction the evil 
harvest and evil vintage of the earth (Rev. xiv. 15). 
I will collect afterwards and complete what I have 
already written respecting the Pegasean and Gorgo- 
nian legends, noting here only what is necessary to 
explain the central myth of Athena herself, who 
represents the ambient air, which included all cloud, 
and rain, and dew, and darkness, and peace, and 
wrath of heaven. Let me now try to give you, how- 
ever briefly, some distinct idea of the several agencies 
of this great goddess. 

31. I. She is the air giving life and health to all 

animals. 
II. She is the air giving vegetative power to 

the earth. 

III. She is the air giving motion to the sea, and 

rendering navigation possible. 

IV. She is the air nourishing artificial light, 

torch or lamplight ; as opposed to that 
of the sun, on one hand, and of con- 
suming* fire on the other, 
V. She is the air conveying vibration of sound. 

* Not a scientific, but a very practical and expressive distinction. 



1 



Athena in the Heavens, 41 

I will give you instances of her agency in all these 
functions. 

32. First, and chiefly, she is air as the spirit of 
life, giving vitality to the blood. Her psychic rela- 
tion to the vital force in matter lies deeper, and we 
will examine it afterwards ; but a great number of 
the most interesting passages in Homer regard her as 
flying over the earth in local and transitory strength, 
simply and merely the goddess of fresh air, 

It is curious that the British city which has some- 
what saucily styled itself the Modern Athens, is 
indeed more under her especial tutelage and favour 
in this respect than perhaps any other town in the 
island. Athena is first simply what in the Modern 
Athens you so practically find her, the breeze of the 
mountain and the sea ; and wherever she comes, there 
is purification, and health, and power. The sea-beach 
round this isle of ours is the frieze of our Parthenon ; 
every wave that breaks on it thunders with Athena's 
voice ; nay, whenever you throw your window wide 
open in the morning, you let in Athena, as wisdom 
and fresh air at the same instant ; and whenever you 
draw a pure, long, full breath of right heaven, you 
take Athena into your heart, through your blood; and, 
with the blood, into the thoughts of your brain. 

Now this giving of strength by the air, observe, is 
mechanical as well as chemical You cannot strike 



42 The Queen of the Air. 

a good blow but with your chest full ; and in hand 
to hand fighting, it is not the muscle that fails first, 
it is the breath ; the longest-breathed will, on the 
average, be the victor, — not the strongest. Note how 
Shakspeare always leans on this. Of Mortimer, in 
" changing hardiment with great Glendower : " — 

* ' Three times they breathed, and three times did they drink, 
Upon agreement, of swift Severn's flood." 

And again, Hotspur sending challenge to Prince 
Harry : — 

" That none might draw short breath to-day 
But I and Harry Monmouth." 

Again, of Hamlet, before he receives his wound : — ■ 

"He's fat, and scant of breath." 

Again, Orlando in the wrestling : — 

" Yes ; I beseech your grace 
I am not yet well breathed." 

Now of all people that ever lived, the Greeks 
knew best what breath meant, both in exercise and 
in battle ; and therefore the queen of the air becomes 
to them at once the queen of bodily strength in war ; 
not mere brutal muscular strength, — that belongs to 
Ares, — but the strength of young lives passed in pure 
air and swift exercise, — Camillas virginal force, 
that " flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along 
the main." 

33. Now I will rapidly give you two or three 



Athena in the Heavens. 43 

instances of her direct agency in this function. First, 
when she wants to make Penelope bright and beauti- 
ful ; and to do away with the signs of her waiting 
and her grief. "Then Athena thought of another 
thing ; she laid her into deep sleep, and loosed all her 
limbs, and made her taller, and made her smoother, 
and fatter, and whiter than sawn ivory ; and breathed 
ambrosial brightness over her face ; and so she left 
her and went up to heaven." Fresh air and sound 
sleep at night, young ladies ! You see you may have 
Athena for lady's maid whenever you choose. Next, 
hark how she gives strength to Achilles when he is 
broken with fasting and grief. Jupiter pities him and 
says to her, — " ' Daughter mine, are you forsaking 
your own soldier, and don't you care for Achilles any 
more ? see how T hungry and \veak he is, — go and feed 
him with ambrosia.' So he urged the eager Athena ; 
and she leaped down out of heaven like a harpy 
falcon, shrill voiced ; and she poured nectar and 
ambrosia, full of delight, into the breast of Achilles, 
that his limbs might not fail with famine : then she 
returned to the solid dome of her strong father." 
And then comes the great passage about Achilles 
arming — for which we have no time. But here is 
again Athena giving strength to the whole Greek 
army. She came as a falcon to Achilles, straight at 
him ; — a sudden drift of breeze ; but to the army she 



44 The Queen of the Air. 

must come widely, — she sweeps round them all. 
" As when Jupiter spreads the purple rainbow over 
heaven, portending battle or cold storm, so Athena, 
wrapping herself round with a purple cloud, stooped 
to the Greek soldiers, and raised up each of them." 
Note that purple, in Homer's use of it, nearly always 
means " fiery," "full of light." It is the light of the 
rainbow, not the colour of it, which Homer means 
you to think of. 

34. But the most curious passage of all, and 
fullest of meaning, is when she gives strength to 
Menelaus, that he may stand unwearied against 
Hector. He prays to her: "And blue-eyed Athena 
was glad that he prayed to her, first ; and she gave 
him strength in his shoulders, and in his limbs, and 
she gave him the courage " — -of what animal, do you 
suppose ? Had it been Neptune or Mars, they would 
have given him the courage of a bull, or a lion ; but 
Athena gives him the courage of the most fearless in 
attack of all creatures— small or great— and very 
small it is, but wholly incapable of terror, — she gives 
him the courage of a fly. 

35. Now this simile of Homer's is one of the best 
instances I can give you of the way in which great 
writers seize truths unconsciously which are for all 
time. It is only recent science which has completely 
shown the perfectness of this minute symbol of the 



Athena in the Heavens. 45 

power of Athena ; proving that the insect's flight and 
breath are co-ordinated ; that its wings are actually 
forcing-pumps, of which the stroke compels the 
thoracic respiration ; and that it thus breathes and 
flies simultaneously by the action of the same muscles, 
so that respiration is carried on most vigorously 
during flight, " while the air-vessels, supplied by many 
pairs of lungs instead of one, traverse the organs of 
flight in far greater numbers than the capillary blood- 
vessels of our own system, and give enormous and 
untiring muscular power, a rapidity of action mea- 
sured by thousands of strokes in the minute, and an 
endurance, by miles and hours of flight."* 

Homer could not have known this ; neither that 
the buzzing of the fly was produced as in a wind 
instrument, by a constant current of air through the 
trachea. But he had seen, and, doubtless, meant us 
to remember, the marvellous strength and swiftness 
of the insect's flight (the glance of the swallow itself 
is clumsy and slow compared to the darting of 
common house-flies at play) ; he probably attributed 
its murmur to the wings, but in this also there was 
a type of what we shall presently find recognized in 
the name of Pallas, — the vibratory power of the air 
to convey sound, — while, as a purifying creature, the 
fly holds its place beside the old symbol of Athena 

* Ormerod. Natural History of Wasps. 



46 The Qtteen of the Air. 

in Egypt, the vulture ; and as a venomous and tor- 
menting creature, has more than the strength of the 
serpent in proportion to its size, being thus entirely 
representative of the influence of the air both in 
purification and pestilence ; and its courage is so 
notable that, strangely enough, forgetting Homers 
simile, I happened to take the fly for an expression 
of the audacity of freedom in speaking of quite 
another subject.* Whether it should be called 
courage, or mere mechanical instinct, may be ques- 
tioned, but assuredly no other animal, exposed to 
continual danger, is so absolutely without sign of fear. 
36. You will, perhaps, have still patience to hear 
two instances, not of the communication of strength, 
but of the personal agency of Athena as the air. 
When she comes down to help Diomed against Ares, 
she does not come to fight instead of him, but she 
takes his charioteer's place. 

" She snatched the reins, she lashed with all her force, 
And full on Mars impelled the foaming horse.'' 

Ares is the first to cast his spear ; then, note 
this, Pope says : — 

" Pallas opposed her hand, and caused to glance, 
Far from the car, the strong immortal lance." 

She does not oppose her hand in the Greek— the 
wind could not meet the lance straight — she catches 
it in her hand, and throws it off. There is no instance 

* See farther on, § 148, pp. 170-172. 



Athena in the Heavens. 47 

in which a lance is so parried by a mortal hand in 
all the Iliad, and it is exactly the way the wind would 
parry it, catching it, and turning it aside. If there 
are any good rifleshots here — they know something 
about Athena's parrying — and in old times the English 
masters of feathered artillery knew more yet. Com- 
pare also the turning of Hector's lance from Achilles : 
Iliad xx. 439. 

37. The last instance I will give you is as lovely 
as it is subtle. Throughout the Iliad, Athena is 
herself the will or Menis of Achilles. If he is to be 
calmed, it is she who calms him ; if angered, it is she 
who inflames him. In the first quarrel with Atrides, 
when he stands at pause, w r ith the great sword half 
drawn, " Athena came from heaven, and stood behind 
him, and caught him by the yellow hair." Another 
god would have stayed his hand upon the hilt, but 
Athena only lifts his hair. "And he turned and 
knew her, and her dreadful eyes shone upon him." 
There is an exquisite tenderness in this laying her 
hand upon his hair, for it is the talisman of his life, 
vow r ed to his own Thessalian river if he ever returned 
to its shore, and cast upon Patroclus' pile, so ordain- 
ing that there should be no return. 

38. Secondly — Athena is the air giving vegetative 
impulse to the earth. She is the wind and the rain — 
and yet more the pure air itself, getting at the earth 



48 The Queen of the Air, 

fresh turned by spade or plough— and, above all, 
feeding the fresh leaves ; for though the Greeks knew 
nothing about carbonic acid, they did know that trees 
fed on the air. 

Now, note first in this, the myth of the air getting 
at ploughed ground. You know I told you the Lord 
of all labour by which man lived was Hephaestus ; 
therefore Athena adopts a child of his, and of the 
Earth,— Erichthonius, — -literally, " the tearer up of 
the ground " — who is the head (though not in direct 
line,) of the kings of Attica; and having adopted 
him, she gives him to be brought up by the three 
nymphs of the dew. Of these, Aglauros, the dweller 
in the fields, is the envy or malice of the earth ; she 
answers nearly to the envy of Cain, the tiller of the 
ground, against his shepherd brother, in her own envy 
against her two sisters, Herse, the cloud dew, who 
is the beloved of the shepherd Mercury ; and Pan- 
drosos, the diffused dew, or dew r of heaven. Liter- 
ally, you have in this myth the words of the blessing 
of Esau— " Thy dwelling shall be of the fatness of 
the earth, and of the dew of heaven from above." 
Aglauros is for her envy turned into a black stone ; 
and hers is one of the voices,— the other being that 
of Cain, — which haunts the circle of envy in the 
Purgatory : — 

" Io sono Aglauro, chi divenne sasso." 



Athena in the Heavens. 49 

But to her two sisters, with Erichthonius, (or the 
hero Erectheus,) is built the most sacred temple of 
Athena in Athens ; the temple to their own dearest 
Athena— to her, and to the dew together : so that it 
was divided into two parts : one, the temple of Athena 
of the city, and the other that of the dew. And this 
expression of her power, as the air bringing the dew 
to the hill pastures, in the central temple of the central 
city of the heathen, dominant over the future intel- 
lectual world, is, of all the facts connected with her 
worship as the spirit of life, perhaps the most important. 
I have no time now to trace for you the hundredth 
part of the different ways in which it bears both upon 
natural beauty, and on the best order and happiness 
of men's lives. I hope to follow out some of these 
trains of thought in gathering together what I have 
to say about field herbage ; but I must say briefly 
here that the great sign, to the Greeks, of the coming 
of spring in the pastures, was not, as with us, in the 
primrose, but in the various flowers of the asphodel 
tribe (of which I will give you some separate account 
presently) ; therefore it is that the earth answers 
with crocus flame to the cloud on Ida ; and the power 
of Athena in eternal life is written by the light of the 
asphodel on the Elysian fields. 

But farther, Athena is the air, not only to the 
lilies of the field, but to the leaves of the forest. We 

4 



50 The Queen of the Air. 

saw before the reason why Hermes is said to be the 
son of Maia, the eldest of the sister stars of spring. 
Those stars are called not only Pleiades, but Vergilise, 
from a word mingling the ideas of the turning or 
returning of spring-time with the outpouring of rain. 
The mother of Virgil bearing the name of Maia, 
Virgil himself received his name from the seven stars ; 
and he, in forming, first, the mind of Dante, and 
through him that of Chaucer (besides whatever special 
minor influence came from the Pastorals and Georgics), 
became the fountain-head of all the best literary 
power connected with the love of vegetative nature 
among civilized races of men. Take the fact for what 
it is worth ; still it is a strange seal of coincidence, in 
word and in reality, upon the Greek dream of the 
power over human life, and its purest thoughts, in 
the stars of spring. But the first syllable of the name 
of Virgil has relation also to another group of words, 
of which the English ones, virtue, and virgin, bring 
down the force to modern days. It is a group con- 
taining mainly the idea of "spring," or increase of 
life in vegetation— the rising of the new branch of the 
tree out of the bud, and of the new leaf out of the 
ground. It involves, secondarily, the idea of green- 
ness and of strength, but primarily, that of living 
increase of a new rod from a stock, stem, or root ; 
(" There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of 



Athena in the Heavens. 51 

Jesse ; ") and chiefly the stem of certain plants — 
either of the rose tribe, as in the budding of the 
almond rod of Aaron ; or of the olive tribe, which 
has triple significance in this symbolism, from the 
use of its oil for sacred anointing, for strength in the 
gymnasium, and for light. Hence, in numberless 
divided and reflected ways, it is connected with the 
power of Hercules and Athena : Hercules plants the 
wild olive, for its shade, on the course of Olympia, 
and it thenceforward gives the Olympic crown, of 
consummate honour and rest ; while the prize at the 
Panathenaic games is a vase of its oil, (meaning en- 
couragement to continuance of effort) ; and from the 
paintings on these Panathenaic vases we get the most 
precious clue to the entire character of Athena. Then 
to express .its propagation by slips, the trees from 
which the oil was to be taken were called " Moriai," 
trees of division (being all descendants of the sacred 
one in the Erechtheum). And thus, in one direction, 
we get to the " children like olive plants round about 
thy table " and the olive grafting of St. Paul ; while 
the use of the oil for anointing gives chief name to 
the rod itself of the stem of Jesse, and to all those 
who w T ere by that name signed for his disciples first 
in Antioch. Remember, farther, since that name 
was first given, the influence of the symbol, both in 
extreme unction, and in consecration of priests and 



5.2 The Queen of the Air. 

kings to their " divine right .;" and think, if you can 
reach with any grasp of thought, what the influence 
on the earth has been, of those twisted branches whose 
leaves give grey bloom to the hill-sides under every 
breeze that blows from the midland sea. But, above 
and beyond all, think how strange it is that the chief 
Agonia of humanity, and the chief giving of strength 
from heaven for its fulfilment, should have been under 
its night shadow in Palestine. 

39. Thirdly — Athena is the air in its power over 
the sea. 

On the earliest Panathenaic vase known — the 
" Burgon" vase in the British Museum — -Athena has a 
dolphin on her shield. The dolphin has two principal 
meanings in Greek symbolism. It means, first, the 
sea ; secondarily, the ascending and descending course 
of any of the heavenly bodies from one sea horizon 
to another — the dolphins' arching rise and replunge 
(in a summer evening, out of calm sea, their black 
backs roll round with exactly the slow motion of a 
water-wheel ; but I do not know how far Aristotle's 
exaggerated account of their leaping or their swiftness 
has any foundation,) being taken as a type of the 
emergence of the sun or stars from the sea in the east, 
and plunging beneath in the west. Hence, Apollo, when 
in his personal power he crosses the sea, leading his 
Cretan colonists to Pytho, takes the form of a dolphin, 



Athena in the Heavens. 53 

becomes Apollo Delphinius, and names the founded 
colony " Delphi." The lovely drawing of the Delphic 
Apollo on the hydria of the Vatican (Le Normand 
and De Witte, vol. ii. p. 6), gives the entire conception 
of this myth. Again, the beautiful coins of Tarentum 
represent Taras coming to found the city, riding on a 
dolphin, whose leaps and plunges have partly the 
rage of the sea in them, and partly the spring of the 
horse, because the splendid riding of the Tarentines 
had made their name proverbial in Magna Grsecia. 
The story of Arion is a collateral fragment of the 
same thought ; and, again, the plunge before their 
transformation, of the ships of ^Eneas. Then, this 
idea of career upon, or conquest of the sea, either 
by the creatures themselves, or by dolphin-like ships, 
(compare the Merlin prophecy,— 

1 ' They shall ride 
Over ocean wide 
With hempen bridle, and horse of tree,)" 

connects itself with the thought of undulation, and of 
the wave-power in the sea itself, which is always 
expressed by the serpentine bodies either of the sea- 
gods or of the sea-horse ; and when Athena carries, 
as she does often in later work, a serpent for her 
shield-sign, it is not so much the repetition of her 
own aegis-snakes as the farther expression of her 
power over the sea-wave ; which, finally, Virgil gives 
in its perfect unity with her own anger, in the 



54 The Queen of the Air. 

approach of the serpents against Laocoon from the 
sea : and then, finally, when her own storm-power is 
fully put forth on the ocean also, and the madness of 
the aegis-snake is given to the wave-snake, the sea- 
wave becomes the devouring hound at the waist of 
Scylla, and Athena takes Scylla for her helmet-crest ; 
while yet her beneficent and essential power on the 
ocean, in making navigation possible, is commemo- 
rated in the Panathenaic festival by her peplus being 
carried to the Erechtheum suspended from the mast 
of a ship. 

In Plate cxv. of vol. ii., Le Normand, are given 
two sides of a vase, which, in rude and childish way, 
assembles most of the principal thoughts regarding 
Athena in this relation. In the first, the sunrise is 
represented by the ascending chariot of Apollo, fore- 
shortened ; the light is supposed to blind the eyes, 
and no face of the god is seen (Turner, in the Ulysses 
and Polyphemus sunrise, loses the form of the god 
in light, giving the chariot-horses only ; rendering in 
his own manner, after 2,200 years of various fall and 
revival of the arts, precisely the same thought as the 
old Greek potter). He ascends out of the sea ; but 
the sea itself has not yet caught the light In the 
second design, Athena as the morning breeze, and 
Hermes as the morning cloud, fly over the sea before 
the sun. Hermes turns back his head ; his face is 



Athena in the Heavens. 55 

unseen in the cloud, as Apollo's in the light ; the 
grotesque appearance of an animal's face is only the 
cloud-phantasm modifying a frequent form of the hair 
of Hermes beneath the back of his cap. Under the 
morning breeze, the dolphins leap from the rippled 
sea, and their sides catch the light. 

The coins of the Lucanian Heracleia give a fair 
representation of the helmed Athena, as imagined in 
later Greek art, with the embossed Scylla. 

40. Fourthly— Athena is the air nourishing artificial 
light — unconsuming fire. Therefore, a lamp was always 
kept burning in the Erechtheum ; and the torch-race 
belongs chiefly to her festival, of which the meaning 
is to show the danger of the perishing of the light 
even by excess of the air that nourishes it : and so 
that the race is not- to the swift, but to the wise. 
The household use of her constant light is symbolized 
in the lovely passage in the Odyssey, where Ulysses 
and his son move the armour while the servants are 
shut in their chambers, and there is no one to hold 
torches for them ; but Athena herself, " having a 
golden lamp," fills all the rooms with light. Her 
presence in war-strength with her favourite heroes is 
always shown by the " unwearied " fire hovering on 
their helmets and shields ; and the image gradually 
becomes constant and accepted, both for the main- 
tenance of household watchfulness, as in the parable 



56 The Queen of the Air. 

of the ten virgins, or as the symbol of direct inspira- 
tion, in the rushing wind and divided flames of 
Pentecost : but, together with this thought of un- 
consuming and constant fire, there is always mingled 
in the Greek mind the sense of the consuming by 
excess, as of the flame by the air, so also of the 
inspired creature by its own fire (thus, again, " the zeal 
of thine house hath eaten me up " — " my zeal hath 
consumed me, because of thine enemies," and the 
like) ; and especially Athena has this aspect towards 
the truly sensual and bodily strength ; so that to 
Ares, who is himself insane and consuming, the 
opposite wisdom seems to be insane and consuming : 
" All we the other gods have thee against us, O Jove ! 
when we would give grace to men ; for thou hast 
begotten the maid without a mind — the mischievous 
creature, the doer of unseemly evil. All we obey 
thee, and are ruled by thee. Her only thou wilt not 
resist in anything she says or does, because thou 
didst bear her — consuming child as she is." 

41. Lastly — Athena is the air, conveying vibration 
of sound. 

In all the loveliest representations in central 
Greek art of the birth of Athena, Apollo stands 
close to the sitting Jupiter, singing, with a deep, quiet 
joyfulness, to his lyre, The sun is always thought 
of as the master of time and rhythm, and as the origin 



Athena in the Heavens. 57 

of the composing and inventive discovery of melody ; 
but the air, as the actual element and substance of the 
voice, the prolonging and sustaining power of it, and 
the symbol of its moral passion. Whatever in music 
is measured and designed, belongs therefore to Apollo 
and the Muses ; whatever is impulsive and passionate, 
to Athena : hence her constant strength of voice or 
cry (as when she aids the shout of Achilles) curiously 
opposed to the dumbness of Demeter. The Apolline 
lyre, therefore, is not so much the instrument pro- 
ducing sound, as its measurer and divider by length 
or tension of string into given notes ; and I believe 
it is, in . a double connection with its office as a 
measurer of time or motion, and its relation to the 
transit of the sun in the sky, that Hermes forms it 
from the tortoise-shell, which is the image of the 
dappled concave of the cloudy sky. Thenceforward 
all the limiting or restraining modes of music belong 
to the Muses ; but the passionate music is wind 
music, as in the Doric flute. Then, when this 
inspired music becomes degraded in its passion, it 
sinks into the pipe of Pan, and the double pipe of 
Marsyas, and is then rejected by Athena. The myth 
which represents her doing so is that she invented the 
double pipe from hearing the hiss of the Gorgonian 
serpents ; but when she played upon it, chancing to 
see her face reflected in water, she saw that it was 



58 The Queen of the Air. 

distorted, whereupon she threw down the flute, which 
Marsyas found. Then, the strife of Apollo and 
Marsyas represents the enduring contest between 
music in which the words and thought lead, and 
the lyre measures or melodizes them, (which Pindar 
means when he calls his hymns " kings over the 
lyre,") and music in which the words are lost, and 
the wind or impulse leads, — generally, therefore, 
between intellectual, and brutal, or meaningless, music. 
Therefore, when Apollo prevails, he flays Marsyas, 
taking the limit and external bond of his shape from 
him, which is death, without touching the mere mus- 
cular strength ; yet shameful and dreadful in dis- 
solution. 

42. And the opposition of these two kinds of 
sound is continually dwelt upon by the Greek 
philosophers, the real fact at the root of all their 
teaching being this, — that true music is the natural 
expression of a lofty passion for a right cause ; that 
in proportion to the kingliness and force of any 
personality, the expression either of its joy or suffer- 
ing becomes measured, chastened, calm, and capable 
of interpretation only by the majesty of ordered, 
beautiful, and worded sound. Exactly in propor- 
tion to the degree in which we become narrow in 
the cause and conception of our passions, incontinent 
in the utterance of them, feeble of perseverance in 



r* 






Athena in the Heavens. 59 

them, sullied or shameful in the indulgence of them, 
their expression by musical sound becomes broken, 
mean, fatuitous, and at last impossible ; the measured 
waves of the air of heaven will not lend themselves 
to expression of ultimate vice, it must be for ever 
sunk into discordance or silence. And since, as before 
stated, every work of right art has a tendency to 
reproduce the ethical state which first developed it, 
this, which of all the arts is most directly ethical in 
origin, is also the most direct in power of discipline ; 
the first, the simplest, the most effective of all instru- 
ments of moral instruction ; while in the failure and 
betrayal of its functions, it becomes the subtlest aid 
of moral degradation. Music is thus, in her health, 
the teacher of perfect order, and is the voice of the 
obedience of angels, and the companion of the course 
of the spheres of heaven ; and in her depravity she is 
also the teacher of perfect disorder and disobedience, 
and the Gloria in Excelsis becomes the Marseillaise. 
In the third section of this volume, I reprint two 
chapters from another essay of mine, ("The Cestus 
of Aglaia,") on modesty or measure, and on liberty, 
containing farther reference to music in her tw r o 
powers ; and I do this now, because, among the many 
monstrous and misbegotten fantasies which are the 
spawn of modern licence, perhaps the most impishly 
opposite to the truth is the conception of music which 



6o The Queen of the Air, 

has rendered possible the writing, by educated persons, 
and, more strangely yet, the tolerant criticism, of such 
words as these : — " This so persuasive art is the only 
one that has no didactic efficacy, that engenders no 
emotions save szich as are without issue on the side 
of moral truth, that expresses nothing of God, nothing 
of reason, nothing of human liberty!' I will not give 
the author's name ; the passage is quoted in the 
Westminster Review for last January, p. 153. 

43. I must also anticipate something of what I 
have to say respecting the relation of the power of 
Athena to organic life, so far as to note that her 
name, Pallas, probably refers to the quivering or 
vibration of the air; and to its power, whether as 
vital force, or communicated wave, over every kind 
of matter, in giving it vibratory movement ; first, and 
most intense, in the voice and throat of the bird ; 
which is the air incarnate ; and so descending through 
the various orders of animal life to the vibrating and 
semi-voluntary murmur of the insect ; and, lower still, 
to the hiss, or quiver of the tail, of the half-lunged 
snake and deaf adder ; all these, nevertheless, being 
wholly under the rule of Athena as representing 
either breath, or vital nervous power ; and, therefore, 
also, in their simplicity, the " oaten pipe and pastoral 
song," which belong to her dominion over the asphodel 
meadows, and breathe on their banks of violets. 



Athena in the Heavens. 61 

Finally, is it not strange to think of the influence 
of this one power of Pallas in vibration ; (we shall see 
a singular mechanical energy of it presently in the 
serpent's motion ;) in the voices of war and peace ? How 
much of the repose — how much of the wrath, folly, 
and misery of men, has literally depended on this one 
power of the air ;— on the sound of the trumpet and of 
the bell— on the lark's song, and the bee's murmur, 

44. Such is the general conception in the Greek 
mind of the physical power of Athena, The spiritual 
power associated with it is of two kinds ;— first, she 
is the Spirit of Life in material organism ; not strength 
in the blood only, but formative energy in the clay ; 
and, secondly, she is inspired and impulsive wisdom 
in human conduct and human art, giving the instinct 
of infallible decision, and of faultless invention. 

It is quite beyond the scope of my present pur- 
pose—and, indeed, will only be possible for me at all 
after marking the relative intention of the Apolline 
myths — to trace for you the Greek conception of 
Athena as the guide of moral passion, But I will 
at least endeavour, on some near occasion,* to define 
some of the actual truths respecting the vital force in 
created organism, and inventive fancy in the works 
of man, which are more or less expressed by the 

* I have tried to do this in mere outline in the two following 
sections of this volume. 



62 The Qtceen of the Air, 

Greeks, under the personality of Athena. You would, 
perhaps, hardly bear with me if I endeavoured farther 
to show you — what is nevertheless perfectly true — 
the analogy between the spiritual power of Athena in 
her gentle ministry, yet irresistible anger, with the 
ministry of another Spirit whom we also, holding for 
the universal power of life, are forbidden, at our worst 
peril, to quench or to grieve. 

45. But, I think, to-night, you should not let me 
close, without requiring of me an answer on one vital 
point, namely, how far these imaginations of Gods 
— which are vain to us — were vain to those who had 
no better trust ? and what real belief the Greek had 
in these creations of his own spirit, practical and 
helpful to him in the sorrow of earth ? I am able 
to answer you explicitly in this. The origin of his . 
thoughts is often obscure, and we may err in en- 
deavouring to account for their form of realization ; 
but the effect of that realization on his life is not 
obscure at all. The Greek creed was, of course, 
different in its character, as our own creed is, according 
to the class of persons who held it. The common 
people's was quite literal, simple, and happy : their 
idea of Athena was as clear as a good Roman Catholic 
peasant's idea of the Madonna. In Athens itself, the 
centre of thought and refinement, Pisistratus obtained 
the reins of government through the ready belief of 



Athena in the Heavens, 63 

the populace that a beautiful woman, armed like 
Athena, was the goddess herself. Even at the close 
of the last century some of this simplicity remained 
among the inhabitants of the Greek islands ; and 
when a pretty English lady first made her way into 
the grotto of Antiparos, she was surrounded, on her 
return, by all the women of the neighbouring village, 
believing her to be divine, and praying her to heal 
them of their sicknesses. 

46. Then, secondly, the creed of the upper classes 
, was more refined and spiritual, but quite as honest, 

and even more forcible in its effect on the life. You 
might imagine that the employment of the artifice 
just referred to implied utter unbelief in the persons 
contriving it ; but it really meant only that the more 
worldly of them would play with a popular faith for 
their own purposes, as doubly-minded persons have 
often done since, all the while sincerely holding the 
same ideas themselves in a more abstract form ; while 
the good and unworldly men, the true Greek heroes, 
lived by their faith as firmly as St. Louis, or the Cid, 
or the Chevalier Bayard. 

47. Then, thirdly, the faith of the poets and 
artists was, necessarily, less definite, being continually 
modified by the involuntary action of their own 
fancies ; and by the necessity of presenting, in clear 
verbal or material form, things of which they had no 



64 The Queen of the Air. 

authoritative knowledge. Their faith was, in some 
respects, like Dante's or Milton's : firm in general 
conception, but not able to vouch for every detail 
in the forms they gave it : but they went considerably- 
farther, even in that minor sincerity, than subsequent 
poets ; and strove with all their might to be as near 
the truth as they could. Pindar says, quite simply, 
" I cannot think so-and-so of the Gods. It must 
have been this way— it cannot have been that way— 
that the thing was done." And as late among the 
Latins as the days of Horace, this sincerity remains, 
Horace is just as true and simple in his religion as 
Wordsworth ; but all power of understanding any 
of the honest classic poets has been taken away from 
most English gentlemen by the mechanical drill in 
verse-writing at school. Throughout the whole of 
their lives afterwards, they never can get themselves 
quit of the notion that all verses were written as an 
exercise, and that Minerva was only a convenient 
word for the last of an hexameter, and Jupiter for 
the last but one. 

48. It is impossible that any notion can be more 
fallacious or more misleading in its consequences. 
All great song, from the first day when human lips 
contrived syllables, has been sincere song. With 
deliberate didactic purpose the tragedians— with pure 
and native passion the lyrists— fitted their perfect 



Athena in the Heavens. 65 

words to their dearest faiths. " Operosa parvus car- 
mina fingo." " I, little thing that I am, weave my 
laborious songs " as earnestly as the bee among the 
bells of thyme on the Matin mountains. Yes, and he 
dedicates his favourite pine to Diana, and he chants 
his autumnal hymn to the Faun that guards his fields, 
and he guides the noble youths and maids of Rome 
in their choir to Apollo, and he tells the farmer's 
little girl that the Gods will love her, though she has 
only a handful of salt and meal to give them — just 
as earnestly as ever English gentleman taught Chris- 
tian faith to English youth, in England's truest days. 

49. Then, lastly, the creed of the philosophers or 
sages varied according to the character and know- 
ledge of each ; — their relative acquaintance with the 
secrets of natural science — their intellectual and sect- 
arian egotism — and their mystic or monastic ten- 
dencies, for there is a classic as well as a mediaeval 
monasticism. They ended in losing the life of Greece 
in play upon words ; but we owe to their early thought 
some of the soundest ethics, and the foundation of the 
best practical laws, yet know T n to mankind. 

50. Such was the general vitality of the heathen 
creed in its strength. Of its direct influence on 
conduct, it is, as I said, impossible for me to speak 
now; only, remember always, in endeavouring to 
form a judgment of it, that what of good or right the 

5 



66 The Queen of the Air. 

heathens did, they did looking for no reward. The 
purest forms of our own religion have always consisted 
in sacrificing less things to win greater ;— time, to win 
eternity,- — the world, to win the skies. The order, 
u sell that thou hast/' is not given without the pro- 
mise, — "thou shalt have treasure in heaven ;" and 
well for the modern Christian if he accepts the alter- 
native as his Master left it — and does not practically 
read the command and promise thus : " Sell that thou 
hast in the best market, and thou shalt have treasure 
in eternity also." But the poor Greeks of the great 
ages expected no reward from heaven but honour, and 
no reward from earth but rest ;— though, when, on 
those conditions, they patiently, and proudly, fulfilled 
their task of the granted day, an unreasoning instinct 
of an immortal benediction broke from their lips in 
song : and they, even they, had sometimes a prophet 
to tell them of a land " where there is sun alike by 
day, and alike by night — jvhere they shall need no 
more to trouble the earth by strength of hands for 
daily bread — but the ocean breezes blow around the 
blessed islands, and golden flowers burn on their bright 
trees for evermore." 



( 6 7 ) 



II. 

ATHENA KERAMITIS* 

{Athena in the Eartli). 

Study, supplementary to the preceding lecture, of the supposed, and actual, 
relations of Athena to the vital force in material' organism. 

51. It has been easy to decipher approximately the 
Greek conception of the physical power of Athena 
in cloud and sky, because we know ourselves what 
clouds and skies are, and what the force of the 
wind is in forming them. But it is not at all easy to 
trace the Greek thoughts about the power of Athena 
in giving life, because we do not ourselves know 
clearly what life is, or in what way the air is necessary 
to it, or what there is, besides the air, shaping the 
forms that it is put into. And it is comparatively 
of small consequence to find out what the Greeks 
thought or meant, until we have determined what 
we ourselves think, or mean, when we translate the 

* "Athena, fit for being made into pottery." I coin the expression 
as a counterpart of yi) TrapQkvia, " Clay intact," 



68 The Queen of the Air. 

Greek word for "breathing" into the Latin-English 
word "spirit." 

52. But it is of great consequence that you 
should fix in your minds — and hold, against the 
baseness of mere materialism on the one hand, and 
against the fallacies of controversial speculation on 
the other — the certain and practical sense of this 
word "spirit ;"— the sense in which you all know that 
its reality exists, as the power which shaped you into 
your shape, and by which you love, and hate, when 
you have received that shape, You need not fear, on 
the one hand, that either the sculpturing or the loving 
power can ever be beaten down by the philosophers 
into a metal, or evolved by them into a gas : but, 
on the other hand, take care that you yourselves, in 
trying to elevate your conception of it, do not lose 
its truth in a dream, or even in a word. Beware 
always of contending for words : you will find them 
not easy to grasp, if you know them in several 
languages. This very w T ord, which is so solemn in 
your mouths, is one of the most doubtful. In Latin 
it means little more than breathing, and may mean 
merely accent ; in French it is not breath, but wit, and 
our neighbours are therefore obliged, even in their 
most solemn expressions, to say "wit" when we say 
"ghost." In Greek, "pneuma," the word we trans- 
late " ghost," means either wind or breath, and the 



Athena in the Earth. 69 

relative word " psyche " has, perhaps, a more subtle 
power ; yet St. Paul's words " pneumatic body " and 
" psychic body" involve a difference in his mind which 
no words will explain. But in Greek and in English, 
and in Saxon and in Hebrew, and in every articulate 
tongue of humanity, the " spirit of man " truly means 
his passion and virtue, and is stately according to the 
height of his conception, and stable according to the 
measure of his endurance. 

53. Endurance, or patience, that is the central 
sign of spirit ; a constancy against the cold and 
agony of death ; and as, physically, it is by the burn- 
ing power of the air that the heat of the flesh is 
sustained, so this Athena, spiritually, is the queen of 
all glowing virtue, the unconsuming fire and inner 
lamp of life. And thus, as Hephaestus is lord of the 
fire of the hand, and Apollo of the fire of the brain, 
so Athena of the fire of the heart ; and as Hercules 
wears for his chief armour the skin of the Nemean 
lion, his chief enemy, whom he slew ; and Apollo has 
for his highest name "the Pythian," from his chief 
enemy, the Python, slain ; so Athena bears always 
on her breast the deadly face of her chief enemy 
slain, the Gorgonian cold, and venomous agony, that 
turns living men to stone. 

54. And so long as .you have that fire of the heart 
within you, and know the reality of it, you need be 



70 The Queen of the Air. 

under no alarm as to the possibility of its chemical 
or mechanical analysis. The philosophers are very 
humourous in their ecstasy of hope about it ; but the 
real interest of their discoveries in this direction is 
very small to human-kind. It is quite true that the 
tympanum of the ear vibrates under sound, and that 
the surface of the water in a ditch vibrates too : but 
the ditch hears nothing for all that ; and my hearing is 
still to me as blessed a mystery as ever, and the in- 
terval between the ditch and me, quite as great If the 
trembling sound in my ears was once of the marriage- 
bell which began my happiness, and is now of the 
passing-bell which ends it, the difference between 
those two sounds to me cannot be counted by the 
number of concussions. There have been some curious 
speculations lately as to the conveyance of mental 
consciousness by " brain-waves." What does it matter 
how it is conveyed ? The consciousness itself is 
not a wave. It may be accompanied here or there 
by any quantity of quivers and shakes, up or down, 
of anything you can find in the universe that is 
shakeable — what is that to me ? My friend is dead, 
and my — according to modern views— vibratory 
sorrow is not one whit less, or less mysterious, to 
me, than my old quiet one. 

55. Beyond, and entirely unaffected by, any ques- 
tionings of this kind, there are, therefore, two plain 



Athena in the Earth. 71 

facts which we should all know : first, that there is 
a power which gives their several shapes to things, or 
capacities of shape ; and, secondly, a power which 
gives them their several feelings, or capacities of feel- 
ing ; and that we can increase or destroy both of 
these at our will. By care and tenderness, we can 
extend the range of lovely life in plants and animals ; 
by our neglect and cruelty, we can arrest it, and bring 
pestilence in its stead. Again, by right discipline we 
can increase our strength of noble will and passion, 
or destroy both. And whether these two forces are 
local conditions of the elements in which they appear, 
or are part of a great force in the universe, out of 
which they are taken, and to which they must be 
restored, is not of the slightest importance to us in 
dealing with them ; neither is the manner of their con- 
nection with light and air. What precise meaning 
we ought to attach to expressions such as that of the 
prophecy to the four winds that the dry bones might 
be breathed upon, and might live, or why the pre- 
sence of the vital power should be dependent on the 
chemical action of the air, and its awful passing away 
materially signified by the rendering up of that breath 
or ghost, we cannot at present know, and need not 
at any time dispute. What we assuredly know is 
that the states of life and death are different, and 
the first more desirable than the other, and by effort 



7 2 The Queen of the Air. 

attainable, whether we understand being " born of the 
spirit " to signify having the breath of heaven in our 
flesh, or its power in our hearts. 

56. As to its power on the body, I will endeavour 
to tell you, having been myself much led into studies 
involving necessary reference both to natural science 
and mental phenomena, what, at least, remains to us 
after science has done its worst ; — what the Myth 
of Athena, as a Formative and Decisive power — a 
Spirit of Creation and Volition, must eternally mean 
for all of us. 

57. It is now (I believe I may use the strong word) 
" ascertained " that heat and motion are fixed in 
quantity, and measurable in the portions that we deal 
with. We can measure out portions of power, as we 
can measure portions of space ; while yet, as far as we 
know, space may be infinite, and force infinite. There 
may be heat as much greater than the sun's, as the 
sun's heat is greater than a candle's ; and force as 
much greater than the force by which the world 
swings, as that is greater than the force by which a 
cobweb trembles. Now, on heat and force, life is in- 
separably dependent ; and I believe, also, on a form of 
substance, which the philosophers call " protoplasm." 
I wish they would use English instead of Greek words. 
When I want to know why a leaf is green, they tell 
me it is coloured by " chlorophyll," which at first j 



•Athena in the Earth. 73 

sounds very instructive ; but if they would only say ' 
plainly that a leaf is coloured green by a thing which 
is called " green leaf," we should see more precisely 
how far we had got. However, it is a curious fact 
that life is connected with a cellular structure called 
protoplasm, or, in English, " first stuck together:" 
whence, conceivably through deuteroplasms, or second 
stickings, and tritoplasms, or third stickings,* we 
reach the highest plastic phase in the human pottery, 
which differs from common chinaware, primarily, by 
a measurable degree of heat, developed in breathing, 
which it borrows from the rest of the universe while 
it lives, and which it as certainly returns to the rest 
of the universe, when it dies. 

58. Again, with this heat certain assimilative 
powers are connected, which the tendency of recent 
discovery is to simplify more and more into modes of 
one force ; or finally into mere motion, communicable 
in various states, but not destructible. We will assume 
that science has done its utmost ; and that every 

* Or, perhaps, we may be indulged with one consummating gleam of 
" give asm " — visible "Sweetness," — according to the good old monk 
"Full moon," or "All moonshine." I cannot get at his original Greek, 
but am content with M. Durand's clear French (Manuel d'Icono= 
graphie Chretienne. Paris, 1845) : — "Lorsque vous aurez fait le 
proplasme, et esquisse un visage, vous ferez les. chairs avec le glycasme 
dont nous avons donne la recette. Chez les vieillards, vous indiquerez 
les rides, et chez les jeunes gens, les angles des yeux. C'est ainsi que 
Ton fait les chairs, suivant Panselinos," . 



74 The Queen of the Air. 

chemical or animal force is demonstrably resolvable 
into heat or motion, reciprocally changing into each 
other. I would myself like better, in order of thought, 
to consider motion as a mode of heat than heat as 
a mode of motion : still, granting that we have got 
thus far, we have yet to ask, What is heat ? or what 
motion ? What is this " primo mobile," this transitional 
power, in which all things live, and move, and have 
their being ? It is by definition something different 
from matter, and we may call it as we choose—" first 
cause," or " first light," or " first heat;" but we can 
show no scientific proof of its not being personal, and 
coinciding with the ordinary conception of a support- 
ing spirit in all things. 

59. Still, it is not advisable to apply the word 
" spirit " or " breathing " to it, while it is only enforcing 
chemical affinities ; but, when the chemical affinities 
are brought under the influence of the air, and of the 
sun's heat, the formative force enters an entirely dif- 
ferent phase. It does not now merely crystallize in- 
definite masses, but it gives to limited portions of 
matter the power of gathering, selectively, other 
elements proper to them, and binding these elements 
into their own peculiar and adopted form. 

This force, now properly called life, or breathing, 
or spirit, is continually creating its own shells of 
definite shape out of the wreck round it : and this is 



Athena in the Earth. 75 

what I meant by saying, in the " Ethics of the Dust :" — 
" you may always stand by form against force." For 
the mere force of junction is not spirit ; but the power 
that catches out of chaos charcoal, water, lime, or 
what not and fastens them down into a given form, 
is properly called " spirit ;" and we shall not diminish, 
but strengthen our conception of this creative energy 
by recognizing its presence in lower states of matter 
than our owtl ; — such recognition being enforced upon 
us by a delight we instinctively receive from all the 
forms of matter which manifest it ; and yet more, by 
the glorifying of those forms, in the parts of them 
that are most animated, with the colours that are 
pleasantest to our senses. The most familiar instance 
of this is the best, and also the most wonderful : the 
blossoming of plants. 

60. The Spirit in the plant, — that is to say, its power 
of gathering dead matter out of the w r reck round it, 
and shaping it into its own chosen shape, — is of course 
strongest at the moment of its flowering, for it then not 
only gathers, but forms, with the greatest energy. 

And w T here this Life is in it at full power, its 
form becomes invested with aspects that are chiefly 
delightful to our own human passions ; namely, first, 
with the loveliest outlines of shape ; and, secondly, 
with the most brilliant phases of the primary colours, 
blue, yellow, and red or white, the unison of all ; 



76 The Queen of the Air. 

and, to make it all more strange, this time of 
peculiar and perfect glory is associated with rela- 
tions of the plants or blossoms to each other, corre- 
spondent to the joy of love in human creatures, 
and having the same object in the continuance of 
the race. Only, with respect to plants, as animals, 
we are wrong in speaking as if the object of this 
strong life were only the bequeathing of itself. The 
flower is the end or proper object of the seed, not 
the seed of the flower. The reason for seeds is 
that flowers may be ; not the reason of flowers that 
seeds may be. The flower itself is the creature which 
the spirit makes ; only, in connection with its perfect- 
ness, is placed the giving birth to its successor. 

6 1. The main fact, then, about a flower is that 
it is the part of the plant's form developed at the 
moment of its intensest life : and this inner rapture is 
usually marked externally for us by the flush of one 
or more of the primary colours. What the character 
of the flower shall be, depends entirely upon the 
portion of the plant into which this rapture of spirit 
has been put. Sometimes the life is put into its 
outer sheath, and then the outer sheath becomes 
white and pure, and full of strength and grace ; 
sometimes the life is put into the common leaves, 
just under the blossom, and they become scarlet or 
purple ; sometimes the life is put into the stalks of 



Athena in the Earth. 77 

the flower, and they flush blue ; sometimes into its 
outer enclosure or calyx ; mostly into its inner cup ; 
but, in all cases, the presence of the strongest life is 
asserted by characters in which the human sight takes 
pleasure, and which seem prepared with distinct refer- 
ence to us, or rather, bear, in being delightful, evidence 
of having been produced by the power of the same 
spirit as our own, 

62. And we are led to feel this still more strongly, 
because all the distinctions of species,* both in plants 
and animals, appear to have similar connection with 
human character. Whatever the origin of species 
may be, or however those species, once formed, may 
be influenced by external accident, the groups into 
which birth or accident reduce them have distinct 
relation to the spirit of man, It is perfectly pos- 
sible, and ultimately conceivable, that the crocodile 
and the lamb may have descended from the same 
ancestral atom of protoplasm ; and that the physical 
laws of the operation of calcareous slime and of 
meadow grass, on that protoplasm, may in time 
have developed the opposite natures and aspects 

* The facts on which I am about to dwell are in nowise antagonistic 
to the theories which Mr. Darwin's unwearied and unerring investigations 
are every day rendering more probable. The aesthetic relations of 
species are independent of their origin. Nevertheless, it has always 
seemed to me, in what little work I have done upon organic forms, a^ 
if the species mocked us by their deliberate imitation of each other 
when they met : yet did not pass one into another. 



78 The Queen of the Air. 

of the living frames ; but the practically important 
fact for us is the existence of a power which creates 
that calcareous earth itself ; — which creates, that sepa- 
rately- — and quartz, separately ; and gold, separately ; 
and charcoal, separately ; and then so directs the 
relations of these elements as that the gold shall 
destroy the souls of men by being yellow ; and the 
charcoal destroy their souls by being hard and bright ; 
and the quartz represent to them an ideal purity ; and 
the calcareous earth, soft, shall beget crocodiles, and 
dry and hard, sheep ; and that the aspects and quali- 
ties of these two products, crocodiles and lambs, shall 
be, the one repellent to the spirit of man, the other 
attractive to it, in a quite inevitable way ; repre- 
senting to him states of moral evil and good ; and 
becoming myths to him of destruction or redemption, 
and, in the most literal sense, " words " of God, 

63. And the force of these facts cannot be escaped 
from by the thought that there are species innumer- 
able, passing into each other by regular gradations, 
out of which we choose what we most love or dread, 
and say they were indeed prepared for us. Species 
are not innumerable ; neither are they now connected 
by consistent gradation. They touch at certain points 
only ; and even then are connected, when we examine 
them deeply, in a kind of reticulated way, not in 
chains, but in chequers ; also, however connected, it is 



Athena in the Earth. 79 

but by a touch of the extremities, as it were, and the 
characteristic form of the species is entirely individual. 
The rose nearly sinks into a grass in the sanguisorba ; 
but the formative spirit does not the less clearly 
separate the ear of wheat from the dog-rose, and 
oscillate with tremulous constancy round the central 
forms of both, having each their due relation to the 
mind of man. The great animal kingdoms are con- 
nected in the same way. The bird through the 
penguin drops towards the fish, and the fish in the 
cetacean reascends to the mammal, yet there is no 
confusion of thought possible between the perfect 
forms of an eagle, a trout, and a war-horse, in their 
relations to the elements, and to man. 

64. Now we have two orders of animals to take 
some note of in connection with Athena, and one 
vast order of plants, which will illustrate this matter 
very sufficiently for us. 

The two orders of animals are the serpent and the 
bird ; the serpent, in which the breath or spirit is 
less than in any other creature, and the earth-power 
greatest : — the bird, in which the breath, or spirit, is 
more full than in any other creature, and the earth 
power least. 

65. We will take the bird first. It is little more 
than a drift of the air brought into form by plumes ; 
the air is in all its quills, it breathes through its 



8o The Qtieen of the Air. 

whole frame and flesh, and glows with air in its fly- 
ing, like a blown flame : it rests upon the air, subdues 
it, surpasses it, outraces it; — is the air, conscious of 
itself, conquering itself, ruling itself. 

Also, into the throat of the bird is given the voice 
of the air. All that in the wind itself is weak, wild, use- 
less in sw r eetness, is knit together in its song. As we 
may imagine the wild form of the cloud closed into 
the perfect form of the bird's wings, so the wild voice 
of the cloud into its ordered and commanded voice ; 
unwearied, rippling through the clear heaven in its 
gladness, interpreting all intense passion through the 
soft spring nights, bursting into acclaim and rapture 
of choir at daybreak, or lisping and twittering among 
the boughs and hedges through heat of day, like little 
winds that only make the cowslip bells shake, and 
ruffle the petals of the wild rose. 

66. Also, upon the plumes of the bird are put 
the colours of the air : on these the gold of the 
cloud, that cannot be gathered by any covetousness ; 
the rubies of the clouds, that are not the price of 
Athena, but are Athena ; the vermilion of the cloud- 
bar, and the flame of the cloud-crest, and the snow 
of the cloud, and its shadow, and the melted blue of 
the deep wells of the sky — all these, seized by the 
creating spirit, and woven by Athena herself into films 
and threads of plume ; with wave on wave following 



Athena in the Earth. 81 

and fading along breast, and throat, and opened 
wings, infinite as the dividing of the foam and the 
sifting of the sea-sand ; — even the white down of the 
cloud seeming to flutter up between the stronger 
plumes, seen, but too soft for touch. 

And so the Spirit of the Air is put into, and 
upon, this created form ; and it becomes, through 
twenty centuries, the symbol of divine help, de- 
scending, as the Fire, to speak, but as the Dove, to 
bless. 

67. Next, in the serpent, we approach the source 
of a group of myths, world-wide, founded on great 
and common human instincts, respecting which I 
must note one or two points which bear intimately 
on all our subject. For it seems to me that the 
scholars who are at present occupied in interpretation 
of human myths have most of them forgotten that 
there are any such things as natural myths ; and that 
the dark sayings of men may be both difficult to read, 
and not always worth reading ; but the dark sayings 
of nature will probably become clearer for the looking 
into, and will very certainly be worth reading. And, 
indeed, all guidance to the right sense of the human 
and variable myths will probably depend on our first 
getting at the sense of the natural and invariable 
ones. The dead hieroglyph may have meant this or 
that — the living hieroglyph means always the same ; 

6 



82 The Queen of the Air. 

but remember, it is just as much a hieroglyph as the 
other ; nay, more, — a " sacred or reserved sculpture," 
a thing with an inner language. The serpent crest 
of the king's crown, or of the god's, on the pillars 
of Egypt, is a mystery ; but the serpent itself, gliding 
past the pillar's foot, is it less a mystery ? Is there, 
indeed, no tongue, except the mute forked flash from 
its lips, in that running brook of horror on the 
ground ? 

68. Why that horror ? We all feel it, yet how 
imaginative it is, how disproportioned to the real 
strength of the creature ! There is more poison in 
an ill-kept drain, — in a pool of dish-washings at 
a cottage-door, than in the deadliest asp of Nile. 
Every back-yard which you look down into from 
the railway, as it carries you out by Vauxhall or 
Deptford, holds its coiled serpent : all the walls 
of those ghastly suburbs are enclosures of tank 
temples for serpent-worship ; yet you feel no horror 
in looking down into them, as you would if you saw 
the livid scales, and lifted head. There is more 
venom, mortal, inevitable, in a single word, some- 
times, or in the gliding entrance of a wordless 
thought, than ever " vanti Libia con sua rena." 
But that horror is of the myth, not of the creature. 
There are myriads lower than this, and more loath- 
some, in the scale of being ; the links between dead 



Athena in the Earth. 83 

matter and animation drift everywhere unseen. But 
it is the strength of the base element that is so 
dreadful in the serpent ; it is the very omnipotence 
of the earth. That rivulet of smooth silver — how 
does it flow, think you ? It literally rows on the 
earth, with every scale for an oar ; it bites the 
dust with the ridges of its body. Watch it, when 
it moves slowly : — A wave, but without wind ! a 
current, but with no fall ! all the body moving 
at the same instant, yet some of it to one side, 
some to another, or some forward, and the rest 
of the coil backwards ; but all with the same calm 
will and equal way — no contraction, no extension ; 
one soundless, causeless, march of sequent rings, and 
spectral procession of spotted dust, with dissolution 
in its fangs, dislocation in its coils. Startle it ;- — the 
winding stream w T ill become a twisted arrow ; — the 
wave of poisoned life will lash through the grass like 
a cast lance.* It scarcely breathes with its one lung 
(the other shrivelled and abortive) ; it is passive to the 

* I cannot understand this swift forward motion of serpents. The 
seizure of prey by the constrictor, though invisibly swift, is quite simple 
in mechanism ; it is simply the return to its coil of an opened watch- 
spring, and is just as instantaneous. But the steady and continuous 
motion, without a visible fulcrum (for the whole body moves at the 
same instant, and I have often seen even small snakes glide as fast 
as I could walk), seems to involve a vibration of the scales quite too 
rapid to be conceived. The motion of the crest and dorsal nn of the 
hippocampus, which is one of the intermediate types between serpent 



84 The Queen of the Air. 

sun and shade, and is cold or hot like a stone ; yet 
" it can outclimb the monkey, outswim the fish, out- 
leap the zebra, outwrestle the athlete, and crush the 
tiger."* It is a divine hieroglyph of the demoniac 
power of the earth, — of the entire earthly nature. 
As the bird is the clothed power of the air, so this 
is the clothed power of the dust ; as the bird the 
symbol of the spirit of life, so this of the grasp and 
sting of death. 

69. Hence the continual change in the interpreta- 
tion put upon it in various religions. As the worm of 
corruption, it is the mightiest of all adversaries of the 
gods — the special adversary of their light and creative 
power — Python against Apollo. As the power of the 
earth against the air, the giants are serpent-bodied 
in the Giganto-machia ; but as the power of the 
earth upon the seed — consuming it into new life 
("that which thou sowest is not quickened except 
it die") — serpents sustain the chariot of the spirit 
of agriculture. 

70. Yet, on the other hand, there is a power in the 
earth to take away corruption, and to purify, (hence 

and fish, perhaps gives some resemblance of it, dimly visible, for the 
quivering turns the fin into a mere mist. The entrance of the two barbs 
of a bee's sting by alternate motion, ' ' the teeth of one barb acting as 
a fulcrum for the other," must be something like the serpent motion on 
a small scale. 

* Richard Owen. 



Athena in the Earth. 85 

the very fact of burial, and many uses of earth, only 
lately known) ; and in this sense, the serpent is a 
healing spirit, — the representative of ^Esculapius, 
and of Hygieia ; and is a sacred earth-type in the 
temple of the Dew ; — being there especially a symbol 
of the native earth of Athens ; so that its departure 
from the temple was a sign to the Athenians that 
they were to leave their homes. And then, lastly, 
as there is a strength and healing in the earth, no less 
than the strength of air, so there is conceived to be 
a wisdom of earth no less than a wisdom of the spirit ; 
and when its deadly power is killed, its guiding 
power becomes true ; so that the Python serpent is 
killed at Delphi, where yet the oracle is from the 
breath of the earth. 

71. You must remember, however, that in this, as 
in every other instance, I take the myth at its central 
time. This is only the meaning of the serpent to the 
Greek mind which could conceive an Athena. Its 
first meaning to the nascent eyes of men, and its 
continued influence over degraded races, are subjects 
of the most, fearful mystery. Mr. Fergusson has just 
collected the principal evidence bearing on the matter 
in a work of very great value, and if you read his 
opening chapters, they will put you in possession of 
the circumstances needing chiefly to be considered, 
I cannot touch upon any of them here, except only 



86 The Queen of the Air 

to point out that, though the doctrine of the so-called 
" corruption of human nature/' asserting that there is 
nothing but evil in humanity, is just as blasphemous 
and false as a doctrine of the corruption of physical 
nature would be, asserting there was nothing but 
evil in the earth, — there is yet the clearest evidence 
of a disease, plague, or cretinous imperfection of 
development, hitherto allowed to prevail against 
the greater part of the races of men ; and this 
in monstrous ways, more full of mystery than the 
serpent-being itself. I have gathered for you to-night 
only instances of what is beautiful in Greek religion ; 
but even in its best time there were deep corruptions 
in other phases of it, and degraded forms of many of 
its deities, all originating in a misunderstood worship 
of the principle of life ; while in the religions of lower 
races, little else than these corrupted forms of devo- 
tion can be found ; — all having a strange and dreadful 
consistency with each other, and infecting Christianity, 
even at its strongest periods, with fatal terror of 
doctrine, and ghastliness of symbolic conception, 
passing through fear into frenzied grotesque, and 
thence into sensuality. 

In the Psalter of St. Louis itself, half of its letters 
are twisted snakes ; there is scarcely a wreathed orna- 
ment, employed in Christian dress, or architecture, 
which cannot be traced back to the serpent's coil ; 



Athena in the Earth. 87 

and there is rarely a piece of monkish decorated 
writing in the world, that is not tainted with some 
ill-meant vileness of grotesque — nay, the very leaves 
of the twisted ivy-pattern of the fourteenth century 
can be followed back to wreaths for the foreheads of 
bacchanalian gods. And truly, it seems to me, as I 
gather in my mind the evidences of insane religion, 
degraded art, merciless war, sullen toil, detestable 
pleasure, and vain or vile hope, in which the nations 
of the world have lived since first they could bear 
record of themselves — it seems to me, I say, as if the 
race itself were still half-serpent, not extricated yet 
from its clay ; a lacertine breed of bitterness — the 
glory of it emaciate with cruel hunger, and blotted 
with venomous stain : and the track of it, on the 
leaf a glittering slime, and in the sand a useless 
furrow. 

J2. There are no myths, therefore, by which the 
moral state and fineness of intelligence of different 
races can be so deeply tried or measured, as by those 
of the serpent and the bird ; both of them having an 
especial relation to the kind of remorse for sin, or 
grief in fate, of which the national minds that spoke 
by them had been capable. The serpent and vulture 
are alike emblems of immortality and purification 
among races which desired to be immortal and pure : 
and as they recognize their own misery, the serpent 



88 The Queen of the Air. 

becomes to them the scourge of the Furies, and the 
vulture finds its eternal prey in their breast. The 
bird long contests among the Egyptians with the 
still received serpent symbol of power. But the 
Draconian image of evil is established in the serpent 
Apap ; while the bird's wings, with the globe, become 
part of a better symbol of deity, and the entire form 
of the vulture, as an emblem of purification, is asso- 
ciated with the earliest conception of Athena. In the 
type of the dove with the olive branch, the concep- 
tion of the spirit of Athena in renewed life pre- 
vailing over ruin, is embodied for the whole of futurity ; 
while the Greeks, to whom, in a happier climate and 
higher life than that of Egypt, the vulture symbol 
of cleansing became unintelligible, took the eagle, 
instead, for their hieroglyph of supreme spiritual 
energy, and it thenceforward retains its hold on 
the human imagination, till it is established among 
Christian myths as the expression of the most exalted 
form of evangelistic teaching. The special relation of 
Athena to her favourite bird we will trace presently : 
the peacock of Hera, and dove of Aphrodite, are 
comparatively unimportant myths : but the bird 
power is soon made entirely human by the Greeks 
in their flying angel of victory (partially human, with 
modified meaning of evil, in the Harpy and Siren) ; 
and thenceforward it associates itself with the Hebrew 



Athena in the Earth. 89 

cherubim, and has had the most singular influence on 
the Christian religion by giving its wings to render 
the conception of angels mysterious and untenable, 
and check rational endeavour to determine the nature 
of subordinate spiritual agency ; while yet it has 
given to that agency a vague poetical influence 'of 
the highest value in its own imaginative way. 

73. But with the early serpent-worship there was 
associated another — that of the groves — of which you 
will also find the evidence exhaustively collected in 
Mr. Fergusson's work. This tree- worship may have 
taken a dark form when associated with the Draconian 
one ; or opposed, as in Judea, to a purer faith ; but 
in itself, I believe, it was always healthy, and though 
it retains little definite hieroglyphic power in sub- 
sequent religion, it becomes, instead of symbolic, 
real ; the flowers and trees are themselves beheld and 
beloved with a half-worshipping delight, which is 
always noble and healthful. 

And it is among the most notable indications 
of the volition of the animating power, that we 
find the ethical signs of good and evil set on these 
also, as well as upon animals ; the venom of the 
serpent, and in some respects its image also, being 
associated even with the passionless growth of the 
leaf out of the ground ; while the distinctions of 
species seem appointed with more definite ethical 



90 The Queen of the Air. 

address to the intelligence of man as their material 
products become more useful to him. 

74. I can easily show this, and, at the same time, 
make clear the relation to other plants of the flowers 
which especially belong to Athena, by examining 
the natural myths in the groups of the plants which 
would be used at any country dinner, over which 
Athena would, in her simplest household authority, 
cheerfully rule, here, in England. Suppose Horace's 
favourite dish of beans, with the bacon ; potatoes ; 
some savoury stuffing of onions and herbs with the 
meat ; celery, and a radish or two, with the cheese ; 
nuts and apples for dessert, and brown bread. 

75. The beans are, from earliest time, the most 
important and interesting of the seeds of the great 
tribe of plants from which came the Latin and French 
name for all kitchen vegetables, — things that are 
gathered with the hand — podded seeds that cannot 
be reaped, or beaten, or shaken down, but must 
be gathered green. " Leguminous " plants, all of 
them having flowers like butterflies, seeds in (fre- 
quently pendent) pods, — " Isetum siliqua quassante 
legumen " — smooth and tender leaves, divided into 
many minor ones ; — strange adjuncts of tendril, for 
climbing (and sometimes of thorn) ; — exquisitely 
sweet, yet pure, scents of blossom, and almost always 
harmless, if not serviceable, seeds. It is, of all tribes 



Athena in the Earth. 91 

of plants, the most definite ; its blossoms being entirely 
limited in their parts, and not passing into other forms. 
It is also the most usefully extended in range and 
scale; familiar in the height of the forest— acacia, 
laburnum, Judas-tree; familiar in the sown field — 
bean and vetch and pea ; familiar in the pasture — in 
every form of clustered clover and sweet trefoil tracery ; 
the most entirely serviceable and human of all orders 
of plants. 

76. Next, in the potato, we have the scarcely 
innocent underground stem of one of a tribe set aside 
for evil ; having the deadly nightshade for its queen, 
and including the henbane, the witch's mandrake, 
and the w r orst natural curse of modern civilization — ■ 
tobacco.* And the strange thing about this tribe is, 
that though thus set aside for evil, they are not a 
group distinctly separate from those that are happier 
in function. There is nothing in other tribes of plants 
like the form of the bean blossom ; but there is 
another family with forms and structure closely con- 
nected with this venomous one. Examine the purple 
and yellow bloom of the common hedge night- 
shade ; you will find it constructed exactly like some 
of the forms of the cyclamen ; and, getting this clue, 



* It is not easy to estimate the demoralizing effect on the youth of 
Europe of the cigar, in enabling them to pass their time happily in 
idleness. 



92 The Queen of the Air. 

you will find at last the whole poisonous and terrible 
group to be — sisters of the primulas ! 

The nightshades are, in fact, primroses with a 
curse upon them ; and a sign set in their petals, 
by which the deadly and condemned flowers may 
always be known from the innocent ones, — that 
the stamens of the nightshades are between the 
lobes, and of the primulas, opposite the lobes, of 
the corolla. 

y/. Next, side by side, in the celery and radish, 
you have the two great groups of umbelled and cruci- 
ferous plants ; alike in conditions of rank among 
herbs : both flowering in clusters ; but the umbelled 
group, flat, the crucifers, in spires : — both of them 
mean and poor in the blossom, and losing what 
beauty they have by too close crowding : — both of 
them having the most curious influence on human 
character in the temperate zones of the earth, from 
the days of the parsley crown, and hemlock drink, 
and mocked Euripidean chervil, until now : but chiefly 
among the northern nations, being especially plants 
that are of some humble beauty, and (the crucifers) of 
endless use, when they are chosen and cultivated ; but 
that run to wild waste, and are the signs of neglected 
ground, in their rank or ragged leaves, and meagre 
stalks, and pursed or podded seed clusters. Capable, 
even under cultivation, *of no perfect beauty, though 



Athena in the Earth. 93 

reaching some subdued delightfulness in the lady's 
smock and the wallflower ; for the most part, they 
have every floral quality meanly, and in vain,— they 
are white, without purity ; golden, without precious- 
ness ; redundant, without richness ; divided, without 
fineness ; massive, without strength ; and slender, 
without grace. Yet think over that useful vulgarity 
of theirs ; and of the relations of German and Eng- 
lish peasant character to its food of kraut and cabbage, 
(as of Arab character to its food of palm-fruit,) and 
you will begin to feel what purposes of the forming 
spirit are in these distinctions of species. 

78. Next we take the nuts and apples, — the nuts 
representing one of the groups of catkined trees, whose 
blossoms are only tufts and dust ; and the other, the 
rose tribe, in which fruit and flower alike have been 
the types, to the highest races of men, of all passionate 
temptation, or pure delight, from the coveting of Eve 
to the crowning of the Madonna, above the 



' ' Rosa sempiterna, 
Che si dilata, rigrada, e ridole 
Odor di lode al Sol." 



We have no time now for these, we must go on to the 
humblest group of all, yet the most wonderful, that of 
the grass, which has given us our bread ; and from 
that we will go back to the herbs. 



94 The Q^leen of the Air. 

79. The vast family of plants which, under rain, 
make the earth green for man, and, under sunshine, 
give him bread, and, in their springing in the early 
year, mixed with their native flowers, have given us 
(far more than the new leaves of trees) the thought 
and word of " spring," divide themselves broadly into 
three great groups — the grasses, sedges, and rushes. 
The grasses are essentially a clothing for healthy and 
pure ground, watered by occasional rain, but in itself 
dry, and fit for all cultivated pasture and corn. They 
are distinctively plants with round and jointed stems, 
which have long green flexible leaves, and heads of 
seed, independently emerging from them. The sedges 
are essentially the clothing of waste and more or less 
poor or uncultivable soils, coarse in their structure, 
frequently triangular in stem — hence called " acute" 
by Virgil — and with their heads of seed not extri- 
cated from their leaves. Now, in both the sedges 
and grasses, the blossom has a common structure, 
though undeveloped in the sedges, but composed 
always of groups of double husks, which have mostly 
a spinous process in the centre, sometimes projecting 
into a long awn or beard ; this central process being 
characteristic also of the ordinary leaves of mosses, 
as if a moss were a kind of ear of corn made per- 
manently green on the ground, and with a new and 
distinct fructification. But the rushes differ wholly 



Athena in the Earth. 95 

from the sedge and grass in their blossom structure. 
It is not a dual cluster, but a twice threefold one, 
so far separate from the grasses, and so closely 
connected with a higher order of plants, that I 
think you will find it convenient to group the 
rushes at once with that higher order, to which, if 
you will for the present let me give the general 
name of Drosidae, or dew-plants, it will enable me 
to say what I have to say of them much more shortly 
and clearly. 

'80. These Drosidae, then, are plants delighting in 
interrupted moisture — moisture which comes either 
partially or at certain seasons — into dry ground. 
They are not water-plants ; but the signs of water 
resting among dry places. Many of the true water- 
plants have triple blossoms, with a small triple calyx 
holding them ; in the Drosidae, the floral spirit passes 
into the calyx also, and the entire flower becomes a 
six-rayed star, bursting out of the stem laterally, as 
if it were the first of flowers, and had made its way 
to the light by force through the unwilling green. 
They are often required to retain moisture or nour- 
ishment for the future blossom through long times of 
drought ; and this they do in bulbs under ground, 
of which some become a rude and simple, but most 
wholesome, food for man. 

81. So now, observe, you are to divide the whole 



96 The Queen of the Air. 

family of the herbs of the field into three great 
groups — Drosidas, Carices,* Gramineae — dew-plants, 
sedges, and grasses. Then, the Drosidae are divided 
into five great orders — lilies, asphodels, amaryllids, 
irids, and rushes. No tribes of flowers have had so 
great, so varied, or so healthy an influence on man as 
this great group of Drosidae, depending, not so much 
on the whiteness of some of their blossoms, or the 
radiance of others, as on the strength and delicacy of 
the substance of their petals ; enabling them to take 
forms of faultless elastic curvature, either in cups, as 
the crocus, or expanding bells, as the true lily, or 
heath-like bells, as the hyacinth, or bright and per- 
fect stars, like the star of Bethlehem, or, when they 
are affected by the strange reflex of the serpent 
nature which forms the labiate group of all flowers, 
closing into forms of exquisitely fantastic symmetry 
in the gladiolus. Put by their side their Nereid 
sisters, the water-lilies, and you have in them the 
origin of the loveliest forms of ornamental design, 
and the most powerful floral myths yet recognized 
among human spirits, born by the streams of Ganges, 
Nile, Arno, and Avon. 

82. For consider a little what each of those five 

* I think Carex will be found ultimately better than Cyperus for the 
generic name, being the Virgilian word, and representing a larger sub- 
species. 



Athena in the Earth. 97 

tribes * has been to the spirit of man. First, in their 
nobleness : the Lilies gave the lily of the Annunciation ; 
the Asphodels, the flower of the Elysian fields ; the 
Irids, the fleur-de-lys of chivalry ; and the Amaryllids, 
Christ's lily of the field : while the rush, trodden 
always under foot, became the emblem of humility. 
Then take each of the tribes, and consider the extent 
of their lower influence. Perdita's "The crown 
imperial, lilies of all kinds," are the first tribe ; which, 
giving the type of perfect purity in the Madonna's 
lily, have, by their lovely form, influenced the entire 
decorative design of Italian sacred art ; while orna- 
ment of war was continually enriched by the curves 
of the triple petals of the Florentine " giglio," and 
French fleur-de-lys ; so that it is impossible to count 
their influence for good in the middle ages, partly as 
a symbol of womanly character, and partly of the 
utmost brightness and refinement of chivalry in the 
city w T hich was the flower of cities. 

Afterwards, the group of the turban-lilies, or tulips, 
did some mischief, (their splendid stains having made 
them the favourite caprice of florists ;) but they may 
be pardoned all such guilt for the pleasure they have 

* Take this rough distinction of the four tribes : — Lilies, superior 
ovary, white seeds ; Asphodels, superior ovary, black seeds ; Irids, 
inferior ovary, style (typically) rising into central crest ; Amaryllids, 
inferior ovary, stamens (typically) joined in central cup. Then the 
rushes are a dark group, through which they stoop to the grasses. 



98 The Qtteen of the Air, 

given in cottage gardens, and are yet to give, when 
lowly life may again be possible among us ; and the 
crimson bars of the tulips in their trim beds, with 
their likeness in crimson bars of morning above them, 
and its dew glittering heavy, globed in their glossy 
cups, may be loved better than the gray nettles of 
the ash heap, under gray sky, unveined by vermilion 
or by gold. 

83. The next great group, of the Asphodels, divides 
itself also into two principal families ; one, in which 
the flowers are like stars, and clustered character- 
istically in balls, though opening sometimes into 
looser heads ; and the other, in which the flowers are 
in long bells, opening suddenly at the lips, and 
clustered in spires on a long stem, or drooping from 
it, when bent by their weight. 

The star-group, of the squills, garlics, and onions, 
has always caused me great wonder. I cannot under- 
stand why its beauty, and serviceableness, should 
have been associated with the rank scent which has 
been really among the most powerful means of 
degrading peasant life, and separating it from that 
of the higher classes. 

The belled group, of the hyacinth and convallaria, 
is as delicate as the other is coarse : the unspeakable 
azure light along the ground of the wood hyacinth in 
English spring ; the grape hyacinth, which is in south 



Athena in the Earth. 99 

France, as if a cluster of grapes and a hive of honey 
had been distilled and compressed together into one 
small boss of celled and beaded blue ; the lilies of the 
valley everywhere, in each sweet and wild recess of 
rocky lands ; — count the influences of these on childish 
and innocent life ; then measure the mythic power of 
the hyacinth and asphodel as connected with Greek 
thoughts of immortality ; finally take their useful and 
nourishing power in ancient and modern peasant life, 
and it will be strange if you do not feel what fixed 
relation exists between the agency of the creating 
spirit in these, and in us who live by them. 

84. It is impossible to bring into any tenable com- 
pass for our present purpose, even hints of the human 
influence of the two remaining orders of Amaryllids 
and Irids ; — only note this generally, that while these in 
northern countries share with the Primulas the fields 
of spring, it seems that in Greece, the primulaceae 
are not an extended tribe, while the crocus, narcissus, 
and Amaryllis lutea, the " lily of the field " (I sus- 
pect also that the flower whose name we translate 
" violet " was in truth an Iris) represented to the 
Greek the first coming of the breath of life on the 
renewed herbage ; and became in his thoughts the 
true embroidery of the saffron robe of Athena. Later 
in the year, the dianthus (which, though belonging to 
an entirely different race of plants, has yet a strange 



ioo The Queen of the Air. 

look of having been made out of the grasses by 
turning the sheath-membrane at the root of their 
leaves into a flower,) seems to scatter, in multitudi- 
nous families, its crimson stars far and wide. But the 
golden lily and crocus, together with the asphodel, 
retain always the old Greek's fondest thoughts — they 
are only " golden" flowers that are to burn on the 
trees, and float on the streams of paradise, 

85. I have but one tribe of plants more to note at 
our country feast — the savoury herbs ; but must go 
a little out of my way to come at them rightly. All 
flowers whose petals are fastened together, and most o£ 
those whose petals are loose, are best thought of first 
as a kind of cup or tube opening at the mouth, Some- 
times the opening is gradual, as in the convolvulus or 
campanula ; oftener there is a distinct change of direc- 
tion between the tube and expanding lip, as in the 
primrose ; or even a contraction under the lip, making 
the tube into a narrow-necked phial or vase, as in the 
heaths, but the general idea of a tube expanding into 
a quatrefoil, cinquefoil, or sixfoil, will embrace most 
of the forms. 

86. Now it is easy to conceive that flowers of this 
kind, growing in close clusters, may, in process of time, 
have extended their outside petals rather than the 
interior ones (as the outer flowers of the clusters of 
many umbellifers actually do), and thus, elongated and 



Athena in the Earth. 101 

variously distorted forms have established themselves ; 
then if the stalk is attached to the side instead of the 
base of the tube, its base becomes a spur, and thus all 
the grotesque forms of the mints, violets, and lark- 
spurs, gradually might be composed. But, however this 
may be, there is one great tribe of plants separate from 
the rest, and of which the influence seems shed upon 
the rest in different degrees : and these would give the 
impression, not so much of having been developed by 
change, as of being stamped with a character of their 
own, more or less serpentine or dragon-like. And I 
think you will find it convenient to call these generally, 
Draconidce ; disregarding their present ugly botanical 
name, which I do not care even to write once — you 
may take for their principal types the Foxglove, 
Snapdragon, and Calceolaria ; and you will find they 
all agree in a tendency to decorate themselves by 
spots, and with bosses or swollen places in their leaves, 
as if they had been touched by poison. The spot of 
the Foxglove is especially strange, because it draws 
the colour out of the tissue all round it, as if it had 
been stung, and as if the central colour was really an 
inflamed spot, with paleness round. Then also they 
carry to its extreme the decoration by bulging or 
pouting the petal ; — often beautifully used by other 
flowers in a minor degree, like the beating out of bosses 
in hollow silver, as in the kalmia, beaten out appa- 



102 The Queen of the Air. 

rently in each petal by the stamens instead of a 
hammer ; or the borage, pouting inwards ; but the 
snapdragons and calceolarias carry it to its extreme. 

87. Then the spirit of these Draconidae seems to 
pass more or less into other flowers, whose forms are 
properly pure vases ; but it affects some of them 
slightly, — others not at all. It never strongly affects 
the heaths ; never once the roses ; but it enters like 
an evil spirit into the buttercup, and turns it into a 
larkspur, with a black, spotted, grotesque centre, and 
a strange, broken blue, gorgeous and intense, yet 
impure, glittering on the surface as if it were strewn 
with broken glass, and stained or darkening irregularly 
into red. And then at last the serpent charm changes 
the ranunculus into monkshood ; and makes it 
poisonous. It enters into the forget-me-not, and the 
star of heavenly turquoise is corrupted into the viper's 
bugloss, darkened with the same strange red as 
the larkspur, and fretted into a fringe of thorn ; it 
enters, together with a strange insect-spirit, into the 
asphodels, and (though with a greater interval between 
the groups,) they change into spotted orchidese : it 
touches the poppy, it becomes a fumaria ; the iris, and 
it pouts into a gladiolus ; the lily, and it chequers 
itself into a snake's-head, and secretes in the deep of 
its bell, drops, not of venom indeed, but honey-dew, 
as if it were a healing serpent, For there is an 



Athena in the Earth, 103 

^Esculapian as well as an evil serpentry among the 
Draconidae, and the fairest of them, the " erba della 
Madonna " of Venice, (Linaria Cymbalaria,) descends 
from the ruins it delights in to the herbage at their 
feet, and touches it ; and behold, instantly, a vast group 
of herbs for healing, — all draconid in form, — spotted, 
and crested, and from their lip-like corollas named 
" labiatse ; " full of various balm, and warm strength for 
healing, yet all of them without splendid honour or 
perfect beauty, " ground ivies," richest when crushed 
under the foot ; the best sweetness and gentle bright- 
ness of the robes of the field, — thyme, and marjoram, 
and Euphrasy. 

88. And observe, again and again, with respect to 
all these divisions and powers of plants ; it does not 
matter in the least by what concurrences of circum- 
stance or necessity they may gradually have been 
developed : the concurrence of circumstance is itself 
the supreme and inexplicable fact. We always come 
at last to a formative cause, which directs the cir- 
cumstance, and mode of meeting it. If you ask an 
ordinary botanist the reason of the form of a leaf, he 
will tell you it is a " developed tubercle," and that its 
ultimate form " is owing to the directions of its vas- 
cular threads." But what directs its vascular threads ? 
"They are seeking for something they want," he 
will probably answer. What made them want that ? 



104 The Q^teen of the Air. 

What made them seek for it thus ? Seek for it, in 
five fibres or in three ? Seek for it, in serration, or in 
sweeping curves ? Seek for it, in servile tendrils, or 
impetuous spray ? Seek for it, in woollen wrinkles 
rough with stings, or in glossy surfaces, green with 
pure strength, and winterless delight ? 

89. There is no answer. But the sum of all is, that 
over the entire surface of the earth and its waters, as 
influenced by the power of the air under solar light, 
there is developed a series of changing forms, in 
clouds, plants, and animals, all of which have reference 
in their action, or nature, to the human intelligence 
that perceives them ; and on which, in their aspects 
of horror and beauty, and their qualities of good and 
evil, there is engraved a series of myths, or words of 
the forming power, which, according to the true 
passion and energy of the human race, they have 
been enabled to read into religion. And this form- 
ing power has been by all nations partly confused 
with the breath or air through which it acts, and 
partly understood as a creative wisdom, proceed- 
ing from the Supreme Deity ; but entering into and 
inspiring all intelligences that work in harmony with 
Him. And whatever intellectual results may be in 
modern days obtained by regarding this effluence 
only as a motion or vibration, every formative human 
art hitherto, and the best states of human happiness 



Athena in the Earth. 105 

and order, have depended on the apprehension of its 
mystery (which is certain), and of its personality, 
which is probable. 

90. Of its influence on the formative arts, I have 
a few words to say separately : my present business 
is only to interpret, as we are now sufficiently 
enabled to do, the external symbols of the myth 
under which it was represented by the Greeks as a 
goddess of counsel, taken first into the breast of their 
supreme Deity, then created out of his thoughts, and 
abiding closely beside him ; always sharing and con- 
summating his power. 

91. And in doing this we have first to note the 
meaning of the principal epithet applied to Athena, 
" Glaukopis," " with eyes full of light," the first syllable 
being connected, by its root, with words signifying 
sight, not with words signifying colour. As far as I can 
trace the colour perception of the Greeks, I find it all 
founded primarily on the degree of connection between 
colour and light ; the most important fact to them in 
the colour of red being its connection with fire and 
sunshine ; so that " purple " is, in its original sense, 
" fire-colour," and the scarlet, or orange, of daw r n, more 
than any other fire-colour. I was long puzzled by 
Homer's calling the sea purple ; and misled into think- 
ing he meant the colour of cloud shadows on green 
sea ; whereas he really means the gleaming blaze of 



io6 The Queen of the Air. 

the waves under wide light. Aristotle's idea (partly 
true) is that light, subdued by blackness, becomes 
red ; and blackness, heated or lighted, also becomes 
red. Thus, a colour may be called purple because it 
is light subdued (and so death is called " purple " 
or " shadowy " death) ; or else it may be called purple 
as being shade kindled with fire, and thus said of the 
lighted sea ; or even of the sun itself, when it is thought 
of as a red luminary opposed to the whiteness of the 
moon : "purpureos inter soles, et Candida lunae sidera ;" 
or of golden hair : " pro purpureo pcenam solvens 
scelerata capillo ; " while both ideas are modified 
by the influence of an earlier form of the word, 
which has nothing to do with fire at all, but only with 
mixing or staining ; and then, to make the whole 
group of thoughts inextricably complex, yet rich and 
subtle in proportion to their intricacy, the various rose 
and crimson colours of the murex-dye, — the crimson 
and purple of the poppy, and fruit of the palm, — and 
the association of all these with the hue of blood ; — 
partly direct, partly through a confusion between the 
word signifying "slaughter" and "palm-fruit colour," 
mingle themselves in, and renew the whole nature 
of the. old word ; so that, in later literature, it means 
a different colour, or emotion of colour, in almost every 
place where it occurs ; and casts for ever around the 
reflection of all that has been dipped in its dyes. 



Athena in the Earth. 107 

92, So that the word is really a liquid prism, and 
stream of opal. And then, last of all, to keep the whole 
history of it in the fantastic course of a dream, warped 
here and there into wild grotesque, w 7 e moderns, who 
have preferred to rule over coal-mines instead of the 
sea (and so have turned the everlasting lamp of 
Athena into a Davy's safety-lamp in the hand of 
Britannia, and Athenian heavenly lightning into 
British subterranean "damp"), have actually got our 
purple out of coal instead of the sea ! And thus, 
grotesquely, we have had enforced on us the doubt 
that held the old word between blackness and fire, 
and have completed the shadow, and the fear of it, 
by giving it a name from battle, " Magenta." 

93. There is precisely a similar confusion between 
light and colour in the w r ord used for the blue of the 
eyes of Athena — a noble confusion, however, brought 
about by the intensity of the Greek sense that the 
heaven is light, more than that it is blue. I was not 
thinking of this when I wrote, in speaking of pictorial 
chiaroscuro, " The sky is not blue colour merely : it 
is blue fire, and cannot be painted " (Mod. P. iv. p. 36) ; 
but it was this that the Greeks chiefly felt of it, and 
so " Glaukopis " chiefly means gray-eyed : gray stand- 
ing for a pale or luminous blue ; but it only means 
<( owl-eyed " in thought of the roundness and expan- 
sion, not from the colour ; this breadth and bright- 



108 The Queen of the Air. 

ness being, again, in their moral sense typical of the 
breadth, intensity, and singleness of the sight in 
prudence (" if thine eye be single, thy whole body 
shall be full of light "). Then the actual power of the 
bird to see in twilight enters into the type, and per- 
haps its general fineness of sense. " Before the human 
form was adopted, her (Athena's) proper symbol was 
the owl, a bird which seems to surpass all other crea- 
tures in acuteness of organic perception, its eye being 
calculated to observe objects which to all others are 
enveloped in darkness, its ear to hear sounds dis- 
tinctly, and its nostrils to discriminate effluvia with 
such nicety that it has been deemed prophetic, from 
discovering the putridity of death even in the first 
stages of disease/'* 

I cannot find anywhere an account of the first 
known occurrence of the type ; but, in the early ones 
on Attic coins, the wide round eyes are clearly the 
principal things to be made manifest. 

94. There is yet, however, another colour of great 
importance in the conception of Athena — the dark 
blue of her segis. Just as the blue or gray of her 
eyes was conceived as more light than colour, so 
her segis was dark blue, because the Greeks thought 



* Payne Knight, in his " Inquiry into the Symbolical Language of 
Ancient Art," not trustworthy, being little more than a mass of con- 
jectural memoranda, but the heap is suggestive, if well sifted. 



Athena in the Earth. 109 

of this tint more as shade than colour, and, while 
they used various materials in ornamentation, lapis- 
lazuli, carbonate of copper, or perhaps, smalt, with 
real enjoyment of the blue tint, it was yet in their 
minds as distinctly representative of darkness as 
•scarlet was of light, and, therefore, anything dark,* 



* In the breastplate and shield of Atrides the serpents and bosses 
are all of this dark colour, yet the serpents are said to be like rainbows ; 
but through all this splendour and opposition of hue, I feel distinctly 
that the literal " splendour," with its relative shade, are prevalent in the 
conception ; and that there is always a tendency to look through the hue 
to its cause. And in this feeling about colour the Greeks are separated 
from the eastern nations, and from the best designers of Christian times. 
I cannot find that they take pleasure in colour for its own sake ; it may 
be in something more than colour, or better ; but it is not in the hue 
itself. When Homer describes cloud breaking from a mountain summit, 
the crags became visible in light, not in colour ; he feels only their 
flashing out in bright edges and trenchant shadows : above, the ' ' in- 
finite," " unspeakable " aether is torn open — but not the blue of it. He 
has scarcely any abstract pleasure in blue, or green, or gold ; but only 
in their shade or flame. 

I have yet to trace the causes of this (which will be a long task, 
belonging to art questions, not to mythological ones) ; but it is, I 
believe, much connected with the brooding of the shadow of death over 
the Greeks, without any clear hope of immortality. The restriction of 
the colour on their vases to dim red (or yellow) with black and white, is 
greatly connected with their sepulchral use, and with all the melancholy 
of Greek tragic thought ; and in this gloom the failure of colour-per- 
ception is partly noble, partly base : noble, in its earnestness, which 
raises the design of Greek vases as far above the designing of mere 
colourist nations like the Chinese, as men's thoughts are above children's ; 
and yet it is partly base and earthly ; and inherently defective in one 
human faculty ; and I believe it was one cause of the perishing of their 
art so swiftly, for indeed there is no decline so sudden, or down to such 
utter loss and ludicrous depravity, as the fall of Greek design on its 



no The Queen of the Air. 

but especially the colour of heavy thunder-cloud, 
was described by the same term. The physical' 
power of this darkness of the aegis, fringed with 
lightning, is given quite simply when Jupiter himself 
uses it to overshadow Ida and the Plain of Troy, 
and withdraws it at the prayer of Ajax for light ; 
and again when he grants it to be worn for a time 
by Apollo, who is hidden by its cloud when he 
strikes down Patroclus : but its spiritual power is 
chiefly expressed by a word signifying deeper shadow ; 
- — the gloom of Erebus, or of our evening, which, 
when spoken of the segis, signifies not merely the 
indignation of Athena, but the entire hiding or with- 
drawal of her help, and beyond even this, her deadliest 
of all hostility, — the darkness by which she herself 
deceives and beguiles to final ruin those to whom she . 
is wholly adverse ; this contradiction of her own 
glory being the uttermost judgment upon human 
falsehood. Thus it is she who provokes Pandarus 
to the treachery which purposed to fulfil the rape 
of Helen by the murder of her husband in time 



vases from the fifth to the third century, B. c. On the other hand, the 
pure colour-gift, when employed for pleasure only, degrades in another 
direction ; so that among the Indians, Chinese, and Japanese, all intel- 
lectual progress in art has been for ages rendered impossible by the 
prevalence of that faculty : and yet it is, as I have said again and again, 
the spiritual power of art ; and its true brightness is the essential 
characteristic of all healthy schools. 



A thena in the Earth. 1 1 1 

of truce ; and then the Greek King, holding his 
wounded brother's hand, prophesies against Troy 
the darkness of the aegis which shall be over all, 
and for ever.* 

95. This, then, finally, was the perfect colour-con- 
ception of Athena ; — the flesh, snow-white, (the hands, 
feet, and face of marble, even when the statue was 
hewn roughly in wood) ; the eyes of keen pale blue, 
often in statues represented by jewels; the long robe 
to the feet, crocus-coloured ; and the aegis thrown 
over it of thunderous purple ; the helmet golden, 
(II. v. 744), and I suppose its crest also, as that 
of Achilles. 

If you think carefully of the meaning and cha- 
racter which is now enough illustrated for you in each 
of these colours ; and remember that the crocus-colour 
and the purple were both of them developments, in 
opposite directions, of the great central idea of fire- 
colour, or scarlet, you will see that this form of the 
creative spirit of the earth is conceived as robed in the 
blue, and purple, and scarlet, the white, and the gold, 
which have been recognized for the sacred chord of 
colours, from the day when the cloud descended on a 
Rock more mighty than Ida. 

96. I have spoken throughout, hitherto, of the 
conception of Athena, as it is traceable in the Greek 

* IpEfivrjv Alyida iracn. — II. iv. 1 66. 



H2 The Queen of the Air. 

mind ; not as it was rendered by Greek art. It is 
matter of extreme difficulty, requiring a sympathy 
at once affectionate and cautious, and a knowledge 
reaching the earliest springs of the religion of many 
lands, to discern through the imperfection, and, alas ! 
more dimly yet, through the triumphs, of formative 
art, what kind of thoughts they were -that appointed 
for it the tasks of its childhood, and watched by the 
awakening of its strength. 

The religious passion is nearly always vividest 
when the art is weakest ; and the technical skill only 
reaches its deliberate splendour when the ecstasy 
which gave it birth has passed away for ever. It is 
as vain an attempt to reason out the visionary power 
or guiding influence of Athena in the Greek heart, 
from anything we now read, or possess, of the work 
of Phidias, as it would be for the disciples of some 
new religion to infer the spirit of Christianity from 
Titian's " Assumption." The effective vitality of the 
religious conception can be traced only through the 
efforts of trembling hands, and strange pleasures of 
untaught eyes ; and the beauty of the dream can no 
more be found in the first symbols by which it is 
expressed, than a child's idea of fairyland can be 
gathered from its pencil scrawl, or a girl's love for 
her broken doll explained by the defaced features. 
On the other hand, the Athena of Phidias was, in 



Athena in the Earth. 113 

very fact, not so much the deity, as the darling of the 
Athenian people. Her magnificence represented their 
pride and fondness, more than their piety ; and the 
great artist, in lavishing upon her dignities which might 
be ended abruptly by the pillage they provoked, re- 
signed, apparently without regret, the awe of her 
ancient memory; and (with only the careless remon- 
strance of a workman too strong to be proud,) even the 
perfectness of his own art. Rejoicing in the protec- 
tion of their goddess, and in their own hour of glory, 
the people of Athena robed her, at their will, with 
the preciousness of ivory and gems ; forgot or denied 
the darkness of the breastplate of judgment, and 
vainly bade its unappeasable serpents relax their 
coils in gold. 

97. It will take me many a day yet— if days, 
many or few, are given me— to disentangle in any- 
wise the proud and practised disguises of religious 
creeds from the instinctive arts which, grotesquely 
and indecorously, yet with sincerity, strove to 
embody them, or to relate. But I think the reader, 
by help even of the imperfect indications already 
pdven to him, will be able to follow, with a con- 
tinually increasing security, the vestiges of the 
Myth of Athena ; and to reanimate its almost evan- 
escent shade, by connecting it with the now recog- 
nized facts of existent nature, which it, more or less 

8 



ii4 The Queen of the Air. 

dimly, reflected and foretold. I gather these facts 
together in brief sum. 

98. The deep of air that surrounds the earth enters 
into union with the earth at its surface, and with its 
waters ; so as to be the apparent cause of their 
ascending into life. First, it warms them, and shades, 
at once, staying the heat of the sun's rays in its own 
body, but warding their force with its clouds. It 
warms and cools at once, with traffic of balm and 
frost ; so that the white wreaths are withdrawn from 
the field of the Swiss peasant by the glow of 
Libyan rock. It gives its own strength to the sea ; 
forms and fills every cell of its foam ; sustains the 
precipices, and designs the valleys of its waves ; gives 
the gleam to their moving under the night, and the 
white fire to their plains under sunrise ; lifts their 
voices along the rocks, bears above them the spray of 
birds, pencils through them the dimpling of unfooted 
sands. It gathers out of them a portion in the hollow 
of its hand : dyes, with that, the hills into dark blue, 
and their glaciers with dying rose ; inlays with that, 
for sapphire, the dome in which it has to set the 
cloud ; shapes out of that the heavenly flocks : 
divides them, numbers, cherishes, bears them on its 
bosom, calls them to their journeys, waits by their 
rest ; feeds from them the brooks that cease not, and 
strews with them the dews that cease. It spins and 



Athena in the Earth. 115 

weaves their fleece into wild tapestry, rends it, and 
renews ; and flits and flames, and whispers, among 
the golden threads, thrilling them with a plectrum 
of strange fire that traverses them to and fro, and 
is enclosed in them like life. 

It enters into the surface of the earth, subdues it, 
and falls together with it into fruitful dust, from which 
can be moulded flesh ; it joins itself, in dew, to the 
substance of adamant ; and becomes the green leaf 
out of the dry ground ; it enters into the separated 
shapes of the earth it has tempered, commands the 
ebb and flow of the current of their life, fills their 
limbs with its own lightness, measures their existence 
by its indwelling pulse, moulds upon their lips the 
words by which one soul can be known to another ; 
is to them the hearing of the ear, and the beating of 
the heart ; and, passing away, leaves them to the 
peace that hears and moves no more. 

99. This was the Athena of the greatest people 
of the days of old. And opposite to the temple of 
this Spirit of the breath, and life-blood, of man and 
of beast, stood, on the Mount of Justice, and near the 
chasm which was haunted by the goddess-Avengers, 
an altar to a God unknown ; — proclaimed at last to 
them, as one who, indeed, gave to all men, life, and 
breath, and all things ; and rain from heaven, filling 
their hearts with food and gladness. ; — a God who had 



J 1 6 The Queen of the Air. 

made of one blood all nations of men who dwell on 
the face of all the earth, and had determined the times 
of their fate, and the bounds of their habitation. 

ioo. We ourselves, fretted here in our narrow 
days, know less, perhaps, in very deed, than they, 
what manner of spirit we are of, or what manner of 
spirit we ignorantly worship. Have we, indeed, 
desired the Desire of all nations ? and will the Master 
whom we meant to seek, and the Messenger in whom 
we thought we delighted, confirm, when He comes 
to His temple, — or not find in its midst, — the tables 
heavy with gold for bread, and the seats that are 
bought with the price of the dove ? Or is our own 
land also to be left by its angered Spirit ; — left 
among those, where sunshine vainly sweet, and pas- 
sionate folly of storm, waste themselves in the silent 
places of knowledge that has passed away, and of 
tongues that have ceased ? 

This only we may discern assuredly : this, every 
true light of science, every mercifully-granted power, 
every wisely-restricted thought, teach us more clearly 
day by day, that in the heavens above, and the earth 
beneath, there is one continual and omnipotent pre- 
sence of help, and of peace, for all men who know 
that they Live, and remember that they Die. 



( ii7 ) 



III. 

ATHENA ERGANE.* 
{Athena in the Heart.) 

Various Notes relating to the Conception of Athena as the Directress of 
the Imagination and Will. 

ioi. I HAVE now only a few words to say, bearing 
on what seems to me present need, respecting the 
third function of Athena, conceived as the directress 
of human passion, resolution, and labour. 

Few words, for I am not yet prepared to give 
accurate distinction between the intellectual rule of 
Athena and that of the Muses : but, broadly, the 
Muses, with their king, preside over meditative, his- 
torical, and poetic arts, whose end is the discovery 
of light or truth, and the creation of beauty : but 
Athena rules over moral passion, and practically 
useful art. She does not make men learned, but 

* " Athena the worker, or having rule over work." The name was 
first given to her by the Athenians. 



n8 The Queen of the Air. 

prudent and subtle : she does not teach them to 
make their work beautiful, but to make it right. 

In different places of my writings, and through 
many years of endeavour to define the laws of art, 
I have insisted on this rightness in work, and on its 
connection with virtue of character, in so many 
partial ways, that the impression left on the reader's 
mind — if, indeed, it was ever impressed at all — has 
been confused and uncertain. In beginning the series 
of my corrected works, I wish this principle (in my 
own mind the foundation of every other) to be made 
plain, if nothing else is : and will try, therefore, to 
make it so, as far as, by any effort, I can put it into 
unmistakeable words. And, first, here is a very 
simple statement of it, given lately in a lecture on 
the Architecture of the Valley of the Somme, which 
will be better read in this place than in its incidental 
connection with my account of the porches of 
Abbeville. 

102. I had used, in a preceding part of the lecture, 
the expression, " by what faults " this Gothic architec- 
ture fell We continually speak thus of works of art. 
We talk of their faults and merits, as of virtues 
and vices. What do we mean by talking of the 
faults of a picture, or the merits of a piece of stone ? 

The faults of a work of art are the faults of its 
workman, and its virtues his virtues. 



A thena in the Heart. 119 

Great art is the expression of the mind of a great 
man, and mean art, that of the want of mind of a 
weak man. A foolish person builds foolishly, and a 
wise one, sensibly ; a virtuous one, beautifully ; and 
a vicious one, basely. If stone work is well put 
together, it means that a thoughtful man planned it, 
and a careful man cut it, and an honest man cemented 
it. If it has too much ornament, it means that its 
carver was too greedy of pleasure ; if too little, that 
he was rude, or insensitive, or stupid, and the like. 
So that when once you have learned how to spell 
these most precious of all legends, — pictures and 
buildings, — you may read the characters of men, 
and of nations, in their art, as in a mirror; — nay, 
as in a microscope, and magnified a hundredfold ; 
for the character becomes passionate in the art, and 
intensifies itself in all its noblest or meanest delights. 
Nay, not only as in a microscope, but as under a 
scalpel, and in dissection ; for a man may hide him- 
self from you, or misrepresent himself to you, every 
other way ; but he cannot in his work : there, be sure, 
you have him to the inmost All that he likes, all 
that he sees, — all that he can do, — his imagination, 
his affections, his perseverance, his impatience, his 
clumsiness, cleverness, everything is there. If the 
work is a cobweb, you know it was made by a spider ; 
if a honeycomb, by a bee ; a worm-cast is thrown 



120 The Queen of the Air. 

up by a worm, and a nest wreathed by a bird ; and 
a house built by a man, worthily, if he is worthy, 
and ignobly, if he is ignoble. 

And always, from the least to the greatest, as the 
made thing is good or bad, so is the maker of it. 

103. You all use this faculty of judgment more or 
less, whether you theoretically admit the principle or 
not. Take that floral gable ;* you don't suppose the 
man who built Stonehenge could have built that, or 
that the man who built that, would have built Stone- 
henge? Do you think an old Roman would have liked 
such a piece of filigree work ? or that Michael Angelo 
would have spent his time in twisting these stems 
of roses in and out ? Or, of modern handicraftsmen, 
do you think a burglar, or a brute, or a pickpocket 
could have carved it ? Could Bill Sykes Wave done it ? 
or the Dodger, dexterous with finger and tool ? You 
will find in the end, that no man could have done it but 
exactly the man who did it ; and by looking close at 
it, you may, if you know your letters, read precisely 
the manner of man he was. 

104. Now I must insist on this matter, for a grave 
reason, Of all facts concerning art, this is the one 
most necessary to be known, that, while manufacture 

* The elaborate pediment above the central porch at the west end 
of Rouen Cathedral, pierced into a transparent web of tracery, and 
enriched with a border of " twisted eglantine.' * 



Athena in the Heart. 121 

is the work of hands only, art is the work of the 
whole spirit of man ; and as that spirit is, so is the 
deed of it : and by whatever power of vice or virtue 
any art is produced, the same vice or virtue it 
reproduces and teaches. That which is born of evil 
begets evil ; and that which is born of valour and 
honour, teaches valour and honour. All art is either 
infection or education. It must be one or other of 
these. 

105. This, I repeat, of all truths respecting art, 
is the one of which understanding is the most pre- 
cious, and denial the most deadly. And I assert it 
the more, because it has of late been repeatedly, 
expressly, and with contumely, denied ; and that by 
high authority : and I hold it one of the most sor- 
rowful facts connected with the decline of the arts 
among us, that English gentlemen, of high standing 
as scholars and artists, should have been blinded into 
the acceptance, and betrayed into the assertion of 
a fallacy which only authority such as theirs could 
have rendered for an instant credible. For the con- 
trary of it is written in the history of all great 
nations ; it is the one sentence always inscribed on 
the steps of their thrones ; the one concordant voice 
in which they speak to us out of their dust. 

All such nations first manifest themselves as a 
pure and beautiful animal race, with intense energy 



122 The Queen of the Air. 

and imagination. They live lives of hardship by 
choice, and by grand instinct of manly discipline: they 
become fierce and irresistible soldiers ; the nation is 
always its own army, and their king, or chief head of 
government, is always their first soldier. Pharaoh, or 
David, or Leonidas, or Valerius, or Barbarossa, or 
Coeur de Lion, or St. Louis, or Dandolo, or Frederick 
the Great : — Egyptian, Jew, Greek, Roman, German, 
English, French, Venetian, — that is inviolable law 
for them all ; their king must be their first soldier, 
or they cannot be in progressive power. Then, after 
their great military period, comes the domestic 
period ; in which, without betraying the discipline of 
war, they add to their great soldiership the delights 
and possessions of a delicate and tender home-life : 
and then, for all nations, is the time of their perfect 
art, which is the fruit, the evidence, the reward of 
their national ideal of character, developed by the 
finished care of the occupations of peace. That is 
the history of all true art that ever was, or can be : 
palpably the history of it, — unmistakeably, — written 
on the forehead of it in letters of light,— in tongues 
of fire, by which the seal of virtue is branded as deep 
as ever iron burnt into a convict's flesh the seal of 
crime. But always, hitherto, after the great period, 
has followed the day of luxury, and pursuit of the 
arts for pleasure only. And all has so ended. 



Athena in the Heart. 123 

106. Thus far of Abbeville building. Now I have 
here asserted two things, — first, the foundation of art 
in moral character ; next, the foundation of moral 
character in war. I must make both these assertions 
clearer, and prove them. 

First, of the foundation of art in moral character. 
Of course art-gift and amiability of disposition are 
two different things ; a good man is not necessarily a 
painter, nor does an eye for colour necessarily imply 
an honest mind. But great art implies the union of 
both powers : it is the expression, by an art-gift, 
of a pure soul. If the gift is not there, we can have 
no art at all ; and if the soul — and a right soul too— 
is not there, the art is bad, however dexterous. 

107. But also, remember, that the art-gift itself is 
only the result of the moral character of generations. 
A bad woman may have a sweet voice ; but that 
sweetness of voice comes of the past morality of her 
race. That she can sing with it at all, she owes to 
the determination of laws of music by the morality of 
the past. Every act, every impulse, of virtue and vice, 
affects in any creature, face, voice, nervous power, 
and vigour and harmony of invention, at once. Per- 
severance in Tightness of human conduct, renders, 
after a certain number of generations, human art 
possible ; every sin clouds it, be it ever so little a one ; 
and persistent vicious living and following of pleasure 



124 The Queen of the Air. 

render, after a certain number of generations, all art 
impossible. Men are deceived by the long-suffering' 
of the laws of nature ; and mistake, in a nation, the 
reward of the virtue of its sires for the issue of its 
own sins. The time of their visitation will come, 
and that inevitably ; for, it is always true, that if the 
fathers have eaten sour grapes, the children's teeth 
are set on edge. And for the individual, as soon as 
you have learned to read, you may, as I said, know 
him to the heart's core, through his art. Let his art- 
gift be never so great, and cultivated to the height 
by the schools of a great race of men ; and it is still 
but a tapestry thrown over his own being and inner 
soul ; and the bearing of it will show, infallibly, 
whether it hangs on a man, or on a skeleton. If you 
are dim-eyed, you may not see the difference in the 
fall of the folds at first, but learn how to look, and the 
folds themselves will become transparent, and you 
shall see through them the death's shape, or the 
divine one, making the tissue above it as a cloud of 
light, or as a winding-sheet. 

1 08. Then farther, observe, I have said (and you 
will find it true, and that to the uttermost) that, as all 
lovely art is rooted in virtue, so it bears fruit of virtue, 
and is didactic in its own nature. It is often didactic 
also in actually expressed thought, as Giotto's, Michael 
Angelo's, Durer's, and hundreds more ; but that is not 



Athena in the Heart. 125 

its special function, — it is didactic chiefly by being 
beautiful ; but beautiful with haunting thought, no less 
than with form, and full of myths that can be read 
only with the heart. 

For instance, at this moment there is open beside 
me as I write, a page of Persian manuscript, wrought 
with wreathed azure and gold, and soft green, and 
violet, and ruby and scarlet, into one field of pure 
resplendence. It is wrought to delight the eyes only ; 
and does delight them ; and the man who did it 
assuredly had eyes in his head ; but not much more. 
It is not didactic art, but its author was happy : and 
it will do the good, and the harm, that mere pleasure 
can do. But, opposite me, is an early Turner drawing 
of the lake of Geneva, taken about two miles from 
Geneva, on the Lausanne road, with Mont Blanc in the 
distance. The old city is seen lying beyond the wave- 
less waters, veiled with a sweet misty veil of Athena's 
weaving : a faint light of morning, peaceful exceed- 
ingly, and almost colourless, shed from behind the 
Voirons, increases into soft amber along the slope of 
the Saleve, and is just seen, and no more, on the 
fair warm fields of its summit, between the folds 
of a white cloud that rests upon the grass, but 
rises, high and tower-like, into the zenith of dawn 
above. 

log. There is not as much colour in that low amber 



126 The Queen of the Air, 

light upon the hill-side as there is in the palest dead 
leaf. The lake is not blue, but gray in mist, passing 
into deep shadow beneath the Voirons' pines ; a. few 
dark clusters of leaves, a single white flower — scarcely 
seen — are all the gladness given to the rocks of the 
shore. One of the ruby spots of the eastern manu- 
script would give colour enough for all the red that is 
in Turners entire drawing. For the mere pleasure of 
the eye, there is not so much in all those lines of his, 
throughout the entire landscape, as in half an inch 
square of the Persian's page. What made him take 
pleasure in the low colour that is only like the brown 
of a dead leaf? in the cold gray of dawn — in the 
one white flower among the rocks — in these — and no 
more than these ? 

no. He took pleasure in them because he had 
been bred among English fields and hills ; because 
the gentleness of a great race was in his heart, and its 
powers of thought in his brain ; because he knew the 
stories of the Alps, and of the cities at their feet ; 
because he had read the Homeric legends of the clouds, 
and beheld the gods of dawn, and the givers of dew 
to the fields ; because he knew the faces of the crags, 
and the imagery of the passionate mountains, as a man 
knows the face of his friend ; because he had in him 
the wonder and sorrow concerning life and death, 
which are the inheritance of the Gothic soul from the 



Athena in the Heart. 127 

days of its first sea kings ; and also the compassion 
and the joy that are woven into the innermost fabric 
of every great imaginative spirit, born now in countries 
that have lived by the Christian faith with any 
courage or truth. And the picture contains also, for 
us, just this which its maker had in him to give ; and 
can convey it to us, just so far as we are of the temper 
in which it must be received. It is didactic if we are 
worthy to be taught, no otherwise. The pure heart, 
it will make more pure ; the thoughtful, more 
thoughtful. It has in it no words for the reckless or 
the base. 

in. As I myself look at it, there is no fault nor 
folly of my life, — and both have been many and 
great, — -that does not rise up against me, and take 
away my joy, and shorten my power of possession, of 
sight, of understanding. And every past effort of my 
life, every gleam of rightness or good in it, is with me 
now, to help me in my grasp of this art, and its 
vision. So far as I can rejoice in, or interpret either, 
my power is owing to what of right there is in me. 
I dare to say it, that, because through all my life I 
have desired good, and not evil ; because I have been 
kind to many ; have wished to be kind to all ; have 
wilfully injured none ; and because I have loved 
much, and not selfishly ; — therefore, the morning light 
is yet visible to me on those hills, and you, who 



128 The Qiteen of the Air. 

read, may trust my thought and word in such work as 
I have to do for you ; and you will be glad afterwards ' 
that you have trusted them. 

112. Yet remember, — -I repeat it again and yet 
again, — that I may for once, if possible, make this 
thing assuredly clear : — the inherited art-gift must be 
there, as well as the life in some poor measure, or 
rescued fragment, right. This art-gift of mine could 
not have been won by any work, or by any conduct ; 
it belongs to me by birthright, and came by Athena's 
will, from the air of English country villages, and 
Scottish hills. I will risk whatever charge of folly 
may come on me, for printing one of my many childish 
rhymes, written on a frosty day in Glen Farg, just 
north of Loch Leven. It bears date 1st January, 
1828. I was born on the 8th of February, 1819; 
and all that I ever could be, and all that I cannot 
be, the weak little rhyme already shows, 

" Papa, how pretty those icicles are, 
That are seen so near, — that are seen so far ; 
-—Those dropping waters that come from the rocks 
And many a hole, like the haunt of a fox. 
That silvery stream that runs babbling along, 
Making a murmuring, dancing song. 
Those trees that stand waving upon the rock's side, 
And men, that, like spectres, among them glide. 
And waterfalls that are heard from far, 
And come in sight when very near. 
And the water-wheel that turns slowly round. 
Grinding the corn that— requires to be ground,— 



Athena in the Heart. 129 

(Political Economy of the future !) 

x\nd mountains at a distance seen, 

And rivers winding through the plain. 
And quarries with their craggy stones, 
And the wind among them moans." 

So foretelling Stones of Venice, and this essay on 
Athena. 

Enough now concerning myself. 

113. Of Turner's life, and of its good and evil, 
both great, but the good immeasurably the greater, 
his work is in all things a perfect and transparent 
evidence. His biography is simply, — il He did this, 
nor will ever another do its like again." Yet read 
what I have said of him, as compared with the great 
Italians, in the passages taken from the " Cestus of 
Aglaia," farther on, § 158, p. 182. 

114. This then is the nature of the connection of 
morals with art. Now, secondly, I have asserted the 
foundation of both these, at least, hitherto, in war. 
The reason of this too manifest fact is, that, until now, 
it has been impossible for any nation, except a warrior 
one, to fix its mind wholly on its men, instead of on 
their possessions. Every great soldier nation thinks, 
necessarily, first of multiplying its bodies and souls of 
men, in good temper and strict discipline. As long 
as this is its political aim, it does not matter what it 
temporarily suffers, or loses, either in numbers or in 
wealth ; its morality and its arts, (if it have national 

9 



130 The Queen of the Air. 

art-gift,) advance together ; but so soon as it ceases 
to be a warrior nation, it thinks of its possessions 
instead of its men ; and then the moral and poetic 
powers vanish together. 

115, It is thus, however, absolutely necessary to 
the virtue of war that it should be waged by personal 
strength, not by money or machinery. A nation that 
fights with a mercenary force, or with torpedos instead 
of its own arms, is dying. Not but that there is more 
true courage in modern than even in ancient war ; 
but this is, first, because all the remaining life of 
European nations is with a morbid intensity thrown 
into their soldiers ; and, secondly, because their pre- 
sent heroism is the culmination of centuries of inbred 
and traditional valour, which Athena taught them by 
forcing them to govern the foam of the sea-wave and 
of the horse, — not the steam of kettles. 

116. And farther, note this, which is vital to us in 
the present crisis : If war is to be made by money and 
machinery, the nation which is the largest and most 
covetous multitude will win. You may be as scien- 
tific as you choose ; the mob that can pay more for 
sulphuric acid and gunpowder will at last poison its 
bullets, throw acid in your faces, and make an end of 
you ;— of itself, also, in good time, but of you first. 
And to the English people the choice of its fate is 
very near now. It may spasmodically defend its 



Athena in the Heart. 131 

property with iron walls a fathom thick, a few years 
longer — -a very few. No walls will defend either it, 
or its havings, against the multitude that is breeding 
and spreading, faster than the clouds, over the habit- 
able earth. We shall be allowed to live by small 
pedlar's business, and ironmongery — since we have 
chosen those for our line of life — as long as we are 
found useful black servants to the Americans ; and 
are content to dig coals and sit in the cinders ; and 
have still coals to dig, — they once exhausted, or got 
cheaper elsewhere, we shall be abolished. But if we 
think more wisely, while there is yet time, and set our 
minds again on multiplying Englishmen, and not on 
cheapening English wares ; if we resolve to submit 
to wholesome laws of labour and economy, and, 
setting our political squabbles aside, try how many 
strong creatures, friendly and faithful to each other, 
we can crowd into every spot of English dominion, 
neither poison nor iron will prevail against us ; nor 
traffic— nor hatred : the noble nation will yet by the 
grace of Heaven, rule over the ignoble, and force of 
heart hold its own against fire-balls. 

117. But there is yet a farther reason for the 
dependence of the arts on war. The vice and in- 
justice of the world are constantly springing anew, 
and are only to be subdued by battle ; the keepers of 
order and law must always be soldiers. And now, 



132 The Queen of the Air. 

going back to the myth of Athena, we see that 
though she is first a warrior maid, she detests war for 
its own sake ; she arms Achilles and Ulysses in just 
quarrels, but she disarms Ares. She contends, her- 
self, continually against disorder and convulsion, in 
the Earth giants ; she stands by Hercules' side in 
victory over all monstrous evil : in justice only she 
judges and makes war. But in this war of hers she 
is wholly implacable. She has little notion of con- 
verting criminals. There is no faculty of mercy in 
her when she has been resisted. Her word is only, 
" I will mock when your fear cometh." Note the 
words that follow : "when your fear cometh as deso- 
lation, and your destruction as a whirlwind ; " for her 
wrath is of irresistible tempest : once roused, it is 
blind and deaf, — rabies — madness of anger — darkness . 
of the Dies Irse. 

And that is, indeed, the sorrowfullest fact we 
have to know about our own several lives. Wisdom 
never forgives. Whatever resistance we have offered 
to her law, she avenges for ever ; — the lost hour can 
never be redeemed, and the accomplished wrong 
never atoned for. The best that can be done after- 
wards, but for that, had been better ; — the falsest of 
all the cries of peace, where there is no peace, is that 
of the pardon of sin, as the mob expect it. Wisdom 
can " put away " sin, but she cannot pardon it ; and 



Athena in the Heart. 133 

she is apt, in her haste, to put away the sinner as 
well, when the black aegis is on her breast. 

118. And this is also a fact we have to know 
about our national life, that it is ended as soon as 
it has lost the power of noble Anger. When it paints 
over, and apologizes for its pitiful criminalities ; and 
endures its false weights, and its adulterated food ; 
- — dares not decide practically between good and evil, 
and can neither honour the one, nor smite the other, 
but sneers at the good, as if it were hidden evil, and 
consoles the evil with pious sympathy, and conserves 
it in the sugar of its leaden heart, ■ — the end is 
come. 

119. The first sign, then, of Athena's presence 
with any people, is that they become warriors, and 
that the chief thought of every man of them is to 
stand rightly in his rank, and not fail from his 
brother's side in battle. Wealth, and pleasure, and 
even love, are all, under Athena's orders, sacrificed 
to this duty of standing fast in the rank of war. 

But farther: Athena presides over industry, as 
well as battle; typically, over women's industry; 
that brings comfort with pleasantness. Her word to 
us all is : — " Be well exercised, and rightly clothed. 
Clothed, and in your right minds ; not insane and in 
rags, nor in soiled fine clothes clutched from each 
other's shoulders. Fight and weave. Then I myself 



134 The Queen of the Air. 

will answer for the course of the lance, and the colours 
of the loom." 

And now I will ask the reader to look with some 
care through these following passages respecting 
modern multitudes and their occupations, written 
long ago, but left in fragmentary form, in which they 
must now stay, and be of what use they can. 

120. It is not political economy to put a number 
of strong men down on an acre of ground, with no 
lodging, and nothing to eat. Nor is it political 
economy to build a city on good ground, and fill 
it with store of corn and treasure, and put a score 
of lepers to live in it. Political economy creates 
together the means of life, and the living persons who 
are to use them ; and of both, the best and the most 
that it can, but imperatively the best, not the most. 
A few good and healthy men, rather than a multitude 
of diseased rogues ; and a little real milk and wine 
rather than much chalk and petroleum ; but the gist 
of the whole business is that the men and their 
property must both be produced together — not one 
to the loss of the other. Property must not be 
created in lands desolate by exile of their people, nor 
multiplied and depraved humanity, in lands barren 
of bread. 

121. Nevertheless, though the men and their pos- 
sessions are to be increased at the same time, the 



Athena in the Heart. 135 

first object of thought is always to be the multi- 
plication of a worthy people. The strength of the 
nation is in its multitude, not in its territory ; but 
only in its sound multitude. It is one thing, both in 
a man and a nation, to gain flesh, and another to be 
swollen with putrid humours. Not that multitude 
ever ought to be inconsistent with virtue. Two men 
should be wiser than one, and two thousand than two ; 
nor do I know another so gross fallacy in the records 
of human stupidity as that excuse for neglect of crime 
by greatness of cities. As if the first purpose of con- 
gregation were not to devise laws and repress crimes ! 
as if bees and wasps could live honestly in flocks,— 
men, only in separate dens ! — as if it was easy to help- 
one another on the opposite sides of a mountain, and 
impossible on the opposite sides of a street ! But 
when the men are true and good, and stand shoulder 
to shoulder, the strength of any nation is in its 
quantity of life, not in its land nor gold. The more 
good men a state has, in proportion to its territory, 
the stronger the state. And as it has been the mad- 
ness of economists to seek for gold instead of life, 
so it has been the madness of kings to seek for land 
instead of life. They want the town on the other side 
of the river, and seek it at the spear point : it never 
enters their stupid heads that to double the honest 
souls in the town on this side of the river, would make 



136 The Queen of the Air. 

them stronger kings; and that this doubling might 
be done by the ploughshare instead of the spear, and 
through happiness instead of misery. 

Therefore, in brief, this is the object of all true 
policy and true economy : " utmost multitude of 
good men on every given space of ground " — impe- 
ratively always, good, sound, honest men, not a mob 
of white-faced thieves. So that, on the one hand, 
all aristocracy is wrong which is inconsistent with 
numbers ; and, on the other, all numbers are wrong 
which are inconsistent with breeding,, 

122. Then, touching the accumulation of wealth 
for the maintenance of such men, observe, that you 
must never use the terms "money" and "wealth" as 
synonymous. Wealth consists of the good, and there- 
fore useful, things in the possession of the nation : 
money is only the written or coined sign of the relative 
quantities of wealth in each person's possession. All 
money is a divisible title-deed, of immense importance 
as an expression of right to property ; but absolutely 
valueless, as property itself. Thus, supposing a nation 
isolated from all others, the money in its possession 
is, at its maximum value, worth all the property of 
the nation, and no more, because no more can be got 
for it. And the money of all nations is worth, at its 
maximum, the property of all nations, and no more, 
for no more can be got for it. Thus, every article of 



Athena in the Heart. 137 

property produced increases, by its value, the value 
of all the money in the world, and every article of 
property destroyed, diminishes the value of all the 
money in the world. If ten men are cast away on 
a rock, with a thousand pounds in their pockets, and 
there is on the rock neither food nor shelter, their 
money is worth simply nothing ; for nothing is to be 
had for it : if they build ten huts, and recover a cask 
of biscuit from the wreck, then their thousand pounds, 
at its maximum value, is worth ten huts and a cask of 
biscuit. If they make their thousand pounds into two 
thousand by writing new notes, their two thousand 
pounds are still only worth ten huts and a cask of 
biscuit. And the law of relative value is the same 
for all the world, and all the people in it, and all their 
property, as for ten men on a rock. Therefore, money 
is truly and finally lost in the degree in which its 
value is taken from it, (ceasing in that degree to be 
money at all) ; and it is truly gained in the degree 
in which value is added to it. Thus, suppose the 
money coined by the nation to be a fixed sum, 
divided very minutely, (say into francs and cents), 
and neither to be added to, nor diminished. Then 
every grain of food and inch of lodging added to its 
possessions makes every cent in its pockets worth 
proportionally more, and every grain of food it con- 
sumes, and inch of roof it allows to fall to ruin, makes 



138 The Queen of the Air. 

every cent in its pockets worth less ; and this with 
mathematical precision. The immediate value of the 
money at particular times and places depends, indeed, 
on the humours of the possessors of property ; but 
the nation is in the one case gradually getting richer ; 
and will feel the pressure of poverty steadily every- 
where relaxing, whatever the humours of individuals 
may be ; and, in the other case, is gradually growing 
poorer, and the pressure of its poverty will every day 
tell more and more, in ways that it cannot explain, 
but will most bitterly feel. 

123. The actual quantity of money which it coins, 
in relation to its real property, is therefore only of 
consequence for convenience of exchange ; but the 
proportion in which this quantity of money is divided 
among individuals expresses their various rights to 
greater or less proportions of the national property, 
and must not, therefore, be tampered with. The 
Government may at any time, with perfect justice, 
double its issue of coinage, if it gives every man who 
had ten pounds in his pocket, another ten pounds, 
and every man who had ten pence, another ten pence ; 
for it thus does not make any of them richer ; it 
merely divides their counters for them into twice 
the number. But if it gives the newly-issued coins 
to other people, or keeps them itself, it simply robs 
the former holders to precisely that extent. This most 



Athena in the Heart. 139 

important function of money, as a title-deed, on the 
non-violation of which all national soundness of com- 
merce and peace of life depend, has been never 
rightly distinguished by economists from the quite 
unimportant function of money as a means of ex- 
change. , You can exchange goods, — at some incon- 
venience, indeed, but still you can contrive to do it, — • 
without money at all ; but you cannot maintain your 
claim to the savings of your past life without a 
document declaring the amount of them, which the 
nation and its Government will respect. 

124. And as economists have lost sight of this 
great function of money in relation to individual 
rights, so they have equally lost sight of its function as 
a representative of good things. That, for every good 
thing produced, so much money is put into every- 
body's pocket — is the one simple and primal truth 
for the public to know, and for economists to teach. 
How many of them have taught it ? Some have ; but 
only incidentally ; and others will say it is a truism. 
If it be, do the public know it ? Does your ordinary 
English householder know that every costly dinner 
he gives has destroyed for ever as much money as 
it is worth ? Does every well-educated girl — do even 
the women in high political position- — know that 
every fine dress they w T ear themselves, or cause to 
be worn, destroys precisely so much of the national 



140 The Qtieen of the Air. 

money as the labour and material of it are worth ? 
If this be a truism, it is one that needs proclaim- 
ing somewhat louder. 

125. That, then, is the relation of money and 
goods. So much goods, so much money ; so little 
goods, so little money. But, as there is this true 
relation between money and " goods/' or good things, 
so there is a false relation between money and 
" bads," or bad things. Many bad things will fetch 
a price in exchange ; but they do not increase the 
wealth of the country. Good wine is wealth — drugged 
wine is not ; good meat is wealth — putrid meat is 
not ; good pictures are wealth — bad pictures are not 
A thing is worth precisely what it can do for you ; 
not what you choose to pay for it. You may pay a 
thousand pounds for a cracked pipkin, if you please ; 
but you do not by that transaction make the cracked 
pipkin worth one that will hold water, nor that, nor 
any pipkin whatsoever, worth more than it was before 
you paid such sum for it. You may, perhaps, induce 
many potters to manufacture fissured pots, and many 
amateurs of clay to buy them ; but the nation is, 
through the whole business so encouraged, rich by 
the addition to its wealth of so many potsherds — 
and there an end. The thing is worth what it CAN 
do for you, not what you think it can ; and most 
national luxuries, now-a-days, are a form of potsherd, 



Athena in the Heart. 141 

provided for the solace of a self-complacent Job, 
voluntarily sedent on his ash-heap. 

126. And, also, so far as good things already exist, 
and have become media of exchange, the variations in 
their prices are absolutely indifferent to the nation. 
Whether Mr. A. buys a Titian from Mr. B. for 
twenty, or for two thousand, pounds, matters not 
sixpence to the national revenue : that is to say, it 
matters in nowise to the revenue whether Mr. A. 
has the picture, and Mr. B. the money, or Mr. B. 
the picture, and Mr. A. the money. Which of them 
will spend the money most wisely, and which of 
them will keep the picture most carefully, is, indeed, 
a matter of some importance ; but this cannot be 
known by the mere fact of exchange. 

127. The wealth of a nation then, first, and its 
peace and well-being besides, depend on the number 
of persons it can employ in making good and useful 
things. I say its well-being also, for the character 
of men depends more on their occupations than on 
any teaching we can give them, or principles with 
which we can imbue them. The employment forms 
the habits of body and mind, and these are the 
constitution of the man ; — the greater part of his 
moral or persistent nature, whatever effort, under 
special excitement, he may make to change, or 
overcome them. Employment is the half, and the 



i-42 The Queen of the Air. 

primal half, of education — it is the warp of it ; and 
the fineness or the endurance of all subsequently- 
woven pattern depends wholly on its straightness and 
strength. And, whatever difficulty there may be in 
tracing through past history the remoter connections 
of event and cause, one chain of sequence is always 
clear : the formation, namely, of the character of 
nations by their employments, and the determination 
of their final fate by their character. The moment, 
and the first direction of decisive revolutions, often 
depend on accident; but their persistent course, and 
their consequences, depend wholly on the nature of 
the people. The passing of the Reform Bill by the 
late English Parliament ,may have been more or less 
accidental : the results of the measure now rest on 
the character of the English people, as it has been 
developed by their recent interests, occupations, and 
habits of life. Whether, as a body, they employ their 
new powers for good or evil, will depend, not on their 
facilities of knowledge, nor even on the general intel- 
ligence they may possess ; but on the number of 
persons among them whom wholesome employments 
have rendered familiar with the duties, and modest in 
their estimate of the promises, of Life. 

128. But especially in framing laws respecting the 
treatment or employment of improvident and more or 
less vicious persons, it is to be remembered that as 



Athena in the Heart. 143 

men are not made heroes by the performance of an 
act of heroism, but must be brave before they can 
perform it, so they are not made villains by the 
commission of a crime, but were villains before they 
committed it ; and that the right of public interference 
with their conduct begins when they begin to corrupt 
themselves ; — -not merely at the moment when they 
have proved themselves hopelessly corrupt. 

All measures of reformation are effective in exact 
proportion to their timeliness : partial decay may be 
cut away and cleansed ; incipient error corrected : but 
there is a point at which corruption can no more be 
stayed, nor wandering recalled. It has been the 
manner of modern philanthropy to remain passive until 
that precise period, and to leave the sick to perish, and 
the foolish to stray, while it spent itself in frantic exer- 
tions to raise the dead, and reform the dust. 

The recent direction of a great weight of public 
opinion against capital punishment is, I trust, the 
sign of an awakening perception that punishment is 
the last and worst instrument in the hands of the 
legislator for the prevention of crime. The true in- 
struments of reformation are employment and reward ; 
—not punishment. Aid the willing, honour the vir- 
tuous, and compel the idle into occupation, and there 
will be no need for the compelling of any into the 
great and last indolence of death. 



144 The Queen of the Air, 

129. The beginning of all true reformation among 
the criminal classes depends on the establishment of" 
institutions for their active employment, while their 
criminality is still unripe, and their feelings of self- 
respect, capacities of affection, and sense of justice, not 
altogether quenched. That those who are desirous 
of employment should always be able to find it, will 
hardly, at the present day, be disputed : but that 
those who are ^desirous of employment should of 
all persons be the most strictly compelled to it, the 
public are hardly yet convinced ; and they must be 
convinced. If the danger of the principal thorough- 
fares in their capital city, and the multiplication of 
crimes more ghastly than ever yet disgraced a no- 
minal civilization, are not enough, they will not have 
to wait long before they receive sterner lessons. For our 
neglect of the lower orders has reached a point at which 
it begins to bear its necessary fruit, and every day 
makes the fields, not whiter, but more sable, to harvest. 

1 30. The general principles by which employ- 
ment should be regulated may be briefly stated as 
follows : — 

1. There being three great classes of mechanical 
powers at our disposal, namely, id) vital or muscular 
power ; (b) natural mechanical power of wind, water, 
and electricity ; and (c) artificially produced me- 
chanical power ; it is the first principle of economy 



Athena in the Heart, 145 

to use all available vital power first, then the inex- 
pensive natural forces, and only at last to have 
recourse to artificial power. And this, because it is 
always better for a man to work with his own hands 
to feed and clothe himself, than to stand idle while a 
machine works for him ; and if he cannot by all the 
labour healthily possible to him, feed and clothe him- 
self, then it is better to use an inexpensive machine — 
as a windmill or watermill — than a costly one like a 
steam-engine, so long as we have natural force enough 
at our disposal. Whereas at present we continually 
hear economists regret that the water-power of the 
cascades or streams of a country should be lost, but 
hardly ever that the muscular power of its idle 
inhabitants should be lost ; and, again, we see vast 
districts, as the south of Provence, where a strong 
wind* blows steadily all day long for six days out of 
seven throughout the year, without a windmill, while 
men are continually employed a hundred miles to the 
north, in digging fuel to obtain artificial power. But 
the principal point of all to be kept in view is, 
that in every idle arm and shoulder throughout the 
country there is a certain quantity of force, equivalent 
to the force of so much fuel ; and that it is mere 



* In order fully to utilize this natural power, we only require 
machinery to turn the variable into a constant velocity — no insur- 
mountable difficulty. 

10 



146 The Queen of the Air. 

insane waste to dig for coal for our force, while the 
vital force is unused ; and not only unused, but, in 
being so, corrupting and polluting itself. We waste 
our coal, and spoil our humanity at one and the same 
instant Therefore, wherever there is an idle arm, 
always save coal with it, and the stores of England 
will last all the longer. And precisely the same 
argument answers the common one about " taking 
employment out of the hands of the industrious 
labourer." Why, what is " employment " but the 
putting out of vital force instead of mechanical force ? 
We are continually in search of means of strength, — 
to pull, to hammer, to fetch, to carry ; we waste our 
future resources to get this strength, while we leave 
all the living fuel to burn itself out in mere pestiferous 
breath, and production of its variously noisome forms 
of ashes ! Clearly, if we want fire for force, we want 
men for force first. The industrious hands must 
already have so much to do that they can do no 
more, or else we need not use machines to help them. 
Then use the idle hands first. Instead of dragging 
petroleum with a steam-engine, put it on a canal, and 
drag it with human arms and shoulders. Petroleum 
cannot possibly be in a hurry to arrive anywhere. We 
can always order that, and many other things, time 
enough before we want it. So, the carriage of every- 
thing which does not spoil by keeping may most 



Athena in the Heart. 147 

wholesomely and safely be done by water-traction and 
sailing vessels ; and no healthier work can men be put 
to, nor better discipline, than such active porterage. 

131. (2nd.) In employing all the muscular power 
at our disposal we are to make the employments we 
choose as educational as possible. For a wholesome 
human employment is the first and best method of 
education, mental as well as bodily. A man taught 
to plough, row, or steer well, and a woman taught to 
cook properly, and make a dress neatly, are already 
educated in many essential moral habits. Labour 
considered as a discipline has hitherto been thought 
of only for criminals ; but the real and noblest func- 
tion of labour is to prevent crime, and not to be 
i?£formatory, but Formatory. 

132. The third great principle of employment is, 
that whenever there is pressure of poverty to be met, 
all enforced occupation should be directed to the pro- 
duction of useful articles only, that is to say, of food, 
of simple clothing, of lodging, or of the means of con- 
veying, distributing, and preserving these. It is yet 
little understood by economists, and not at all by the 
public, that the employment of persons in a useless 
business cannot relieve ultimate distress. The money 
given to employ riband-makers at Coventry is merely 
so much money withdrawn from what would have 
employed lace-makers at Honiton : or makers of 



148 The Queen of the Air. 

something else, as useless, elsewhere. We must spend 
our money in some way, at some time, and it cannot 
at any time be spent without employing somebody. 
If we gamble it away, the person who wins it must 
spend it ; if we lose it in a railroad speculation, it has 
gone into some one else's pockets, or merely gone to 
pay navvies for making a useless embankment, instead 
of to pay riband or button makers for making useless 
ribands or buttons ; we cannot lose it (unless by 
actually destroying it) without giving employment 
of some kind ; and therefore, whatever quantity of 
money exists, the relative quantity of employment 
must some day come out of it ; but the distress of 
the nation signifies that the employments given have 
produced nothing that will support its existence. 
Men cannot live on ribands, or buttons, or velvet, or 
by going quickly from place to place ; and every coin 
spent in useless ornament, or useless motion, is so 
much withdrawn from the national means of life. 
One of the most beautiful uses of railroads is to 
enable A to travel from the town of X to take away 
the business of B in the town of Y ; while, in the 
meantime, B travels from the town of Y to take away 
A's business in the town of X. But the national 
wealth is not increased by these operations. Whereas 
every coin spent in cultivating ground, in repairing 
lodging, in making necessary and good roads, in 



Athena in the Heart. 149 

preventing danger by sea or land, and in carriage 
of food or fuel where they are required, is so much 
absolute and direct gain to the whole nation. To 
cultivate land round Coventry makes living easier at 
Honiton, and every acre of sand gained from the sea 
in Lincolnshire, makes life easier all over England. 

4th, and lastly. Since for every idle person, some 
one else must be working somewhere to provide him 
with clothes and food, and doing, therefore, double 
the quantity of work that would be enough for his 
own needs, it is only a matter of pure justice to 
compel the idle person to work for his maintenance 
himself. The conscription has been used in many 
countries, to take away labourers who supported their 
families, from their useful work, and maintain them 
for purposes chiefly of military display at the public 
expense. Since this has been long endured by the 
most civilized nations, let it not be thought that they 
would not much more gladly endure a conscription 
which should seize only the vicious and idle, already 
living by criminal procedures at the public expense ; 
and which should discipline and educate them to 
labour which would not only maintain themselves, 
but be serviceable to the commonwealth. The ques- 
tion is simply this :■ — we must feed the drunkard, 
vagabond, and thief ; — but shall we do so by letting 
them steal their food, and do no work for it ? or 



150 The Queen of the Air. 

shall we give them their food in appointed quantity, 
and enforce their doing work which shall be worth 
it ? and which, in process of time, will redeem their 
own characters, and make them happy and service- 
able members of society ? 

I find by me a violent little fragment of unde- 
livered lecture, which puts this, perhaps, still more 
clearly. Your idle people, (it says,) as they are now, 
are not merely waste coal-beds. They are explosive 
coal-beds, which you pay a high annual rent for. You 
are keeping all these idle persons, remember, at far 
greater cost than if they were busy. Do you think a 
vicious person eats less than an honest one ? or that it 
is cheaper to keep a bad man drunk, than a good man 
sober ? There is, I suppose, a dim idea in the mind of 
the public, that they don't pay for the maintenance of 
people they don't employ. Those staggering rascals at 
the street corner, grouped around its splendid angle of 
public-house, we fancy they are no servants of ours ? 
that we pay them no wages ? that no cash out of our 
pockets is spent over that beer-stained counter ! 

Whose cash is it then they are spending ? It is not 
got honestly by work. You know that much. Where 
do they get it from ? Who has paid for their dinner 
and their pot ? Those fellows can only live in one of 
two ways — by pillage or beggary. Their annual income 
by thieving comes out of the public pocket, you will 



Athena in the Heart. 151 

admit. They are not cheaply fed, so far as they are 
fed by theft. But the rest of their living — all that they 
don't steal — -they must beg. Not with success from 
you, you think. Wise as benevolent, you never gave 
a penny in "indiscriminate charity." Well, I con- 
gratulate you on the freedom of your conscience from 
that sin, mine being bitterly burdened with the memory 
of many a sixpence given to beggars of whom I knew 
nothing, but that they had pale faces and thin waists. 
But it is not that kind of street beggary that the 
vagabonds of our people chiefly practise. It is home 
beggary that is the worst beggars' trade. Home alms 
which it is their worst degradation to receive. Those 
scamps know well enough that you and your wisdom 
are worth nothing to them. They won't beg of you. 
They will beg of their sisters, and mothers, and wives, 
&nd children, and of any one else who is enough 
ashamed of being of the same blood with them to 
pay to keep them out of sight. Every one of those 
blackguards is the bane of a family. That is the 
deadly " indiscriminate charity " — the charity which 
each household pays to maintain its own private curse. 
133. And you think that is no affair of yours ? and 
that every family ought to watch over and subdue its 
own living plague ? Put it to yourselves this way, then : 
suppose you knew every one of those families kept an 
idol in an inner room— a big-bellied bronze figure, to 



152 The Queen of the Air. 

which daily sacrifice and oblation was made ; at whose 
feet so much beer and brandy was poured out every 
morning on the ground : and before which, every 
night, good meat, enough for two men's keep, was set, 
and left, till it was putrid, and then carried outr and 
thrown on the dunghill ; — you would put an end to 
that form of idolatry with your best diligence, I 
suppose. You would understand then that the beer, 
and brandy, and meat, were wasted ; and that the 
burden imposed by each household on itself lay 
heavily through them on the whole community ? But, 
suppose farther, that this idol were not of silent and 
quiet bronze only ; — but an ingenious mechanism, 
wound up every morning, to run itself down in auto- 
matic blasphemies ; that it struck and tore with its 
hands the people who set food before it ; that it was 
anointed with poisonous unguents, and infected the 
air for miles round. You would interfere with the 
idolatry then, straightway ? Will you not interfere 
with it now, when the infection that the venomous 
idol spreads is not merely death — but sin ? 

134. So far the old lecture. Returning to cool 
English, the end of the matter is, that sooner or later, 
we shall have to register our people ; and to know how 
they live ; and to make sure, if they are capable of 
work, that right work is given them to do. 

The different classes of work for which bodies of 



Athena in the Heart. 153 

men could be consistently organized, might ultimately 
become numerous ; these following divisions of occu- 
pation may at once be suggested : — 

1. Road-making.- — Good roads to be made, where- 
ever needed, and kept in repair ; and the annual loss 
on unfrequented roads, in spoiled horses, strained 
wheels, and time, done away with. 

2. Bringing in of waste land, — All waste lands 
not necessary for public health, to be made accessible 
and gradually reclaimed ; chiefly our wide and waste 
seashores. Not our mountains nor moorland. Our 
life depends on them, more than on the best arable 
we have. 

3. Harbour-making. — The deficiencies of safe or 
convenient harbourage in our smaller ports to be 
remedied ; other harbours built at dangerous points 
of coast, and a disciplined body of men always kept 
in connection with the pilot and life-boat services. 
There is room for every order of intelligence in this 
work, and for a large body of superior officers. 

4. Porterage. — All heavy goods, not requiring 
speed in transit, to be carried (under preventive duty 
on transit by railroad) by canal-boats, employing 
men for draught ; and the merchant-shipping service 
extended by sea ; so that no ships may be wrecked 
for want of hands, while there are idle ones in mischief 
on shore. 



154 The Queen of the Air. 

5. Repair of buildings. — A body of men in various 
trades to be kept at the disposal of the authorities in 
every large town, for repair of buildings, especially 
the houses of the poorer orders, who, if no such 
provision were made, could not employ workmen on 
their own houses, but would simply live with rent 
walls and roofs. 

6. Dressmaking. — Substantial dress, of standard 
material and kind, strong shoes, and stout bedding, 
to be manufactured for the poor, so as to render it 
unnecessary for them, unless by extremity of impro- 
vidence, to wear cast clothes, or be without sufficiency 
of clothing. 

7. Works of Art. — Schools to be established on 
thoroughly sound principles of manufacture, and use 
of materials, and with simple and, for given periods, 
unalterable modes of work ; first, in pottery, and 
embracing gradually metal work, sculpture, and 
decorative painting ; the two points insisted upon, 
in distinction from ordinary commercial establish- 
ments, being perfectness of material to the utmost 
attainable degree ; and the production of everything 
by hand-work, for the special purpose of developing 
personal power and skill in the workman. 

The two last departments, and some subordinate 
branches of the others, would include the service of 
women and children. 



Athena in the Heart. 155 

I give now, for such farther illustration as they 
contain of the points I desire most to insist upon with 
respect both to education and employment, a portion 
of the series of notes published some time ago in 
the Art Journal^ on the opposition of Modesty and 
Liberty, and the unescapable law of wise restraint, 
I am sorry that they are written obscurely ; — and it 
may be thought affectedly : — but the fact is, I have 
always had three different ways of writing ; one, with 
the single view of making myself understood, in which 
I necessarily omit a great deal of what comes into 
my head : — another, in which I say what I think 
ought to be said, in what I suppose to be the best 
words I can find for it ; (which is in reality an affected 
style — be it good or bad ;) and my third way of 
writing is to say all that comes into my head for my 
own pleasure, in the first words that come, retouch- 
ing them afterwards into (approximate) grammar, 
These notes for the Art Journal were so written ; 
and I like them myself, of course ; but ask the 
reader's pardon for their confusedness. 
135. " Sir, it cannot be better done." 
We will insist, with the reader's permission, on 
this comfortful saying of Albert Durer's, in order to 
find out, if we may, what Modesty is ; which it will 
be well for painters, readers, and especially critics, to 
know, before going farther. What it is ; or, rather, 



156 The Queen of the Air, 

who she is ; her fingers being among the deftest in 
laying the ground-threads of Aglaia's Cestus. 

For this same opinion of Albert's is entertained 
by many other people respecting their own doings — a 
very prevalent opinion, indeed, I find it ; and the 
answer itself, though rarely made with the Nurem- 
berger's crushing decision, is nevertheless often enough 
intimated, with delicacy, by artists of all countries, in 
their various dialects. Neither can it always be held 
an entirely modest one, as it assuredly was in the 
man who would sometimes estimate a piece of his 
unconquerable work at only the worth of a plate of 
fruit, or a flask of wine— would have taken even one 
" fig for it," kindly offered ; or given it royally for 
nothing, to show his hand to a fellow-king of his 
own, or any other craft— as Gainsborough gave the 
" Boy at the Stile " for a solo on the violin. An 
entirely modest saying, I repeat, in him — not always 
in us. For Modesty is " the measuring virtue," the 
virtue of modes or limits. She is, indeed, said to be 
only the third or youngest of the children of the 
cardinal virtue, Temperance ; and apt to be despised, 
being more given to arithmetic, and other vulgar 
studies (Cinderella-like) than her elder sisters : but 
she is useful in the household, and arrives at great 
results with her yard-measure and slate-pencil — a 
pretty little Marchande des Modes, cutting her dress 



Athena in the Heart. 157 

always according to the silk (if this be the proper 
feminine reading of "coat according to the cloth"), 
so that, consulting with her carefully of a morning, 
men get to know not only their income, but their 
inbeing— to know themselves, that is, in a gauger's 
manner, round, and up and down — surface and con- 
tents ; what is in them, and what may be got out of 
them ; and, in fine, their entire canon of weight and 
capacity. That yard-measure of Modesty's, lent to 
those who will use it, is a curious musical reed, and 
will go round and round waists that are slender 
enough, with latent melody in every joint of it, the 
dark root only being soundless, moist from the wave 
wherein 

" Null' altra pianta die facesse fronda 
O indurasse, puote aver vita. " * 

But when the little sister herself takes it in hand, to 
measure things outside of us with, the joints shoot 
out in an amazing manner : the four-square walls 
even of celestial cities being measurable enough by 
that reed ; and the way pointed to them, though 
only to be followed/or even seen, in the dim starlight 
shed down from worlds amidst which there is no 
name of Measure any more, though the reality of it 
always. For, indeed, to all true modesty the neces- 
sary business is not inlook, but outlook, and especially 

* Pur gator io, i. 103. 



158 The Queen of the Air. 

uplodk : it is only her sister, Shamefacedness, who is 
known by the drooping lashes — Modesty, quite other- 
wise, by her large eyes full of wonder ; for she never 
contemns herself, nor is ashamed of herself, but for- 
gets herself — at least until she has done something 
worth memory. It is easy to peep and potter about 
one's own deficiencies in a quite immodest discon- 
tent ; but Modesty is so pleased with other people's 
doings, that she has no leisure to lament her own : 
and thus, knowing the fresh feeling of contentment, 
unstained with thought of self, she does not fear 
being pleased, when there is cause, with her own 
rightness, as with another's, saying calmly, " Be it 
mine, or yours, or whose else's it may, it is no matter ; 
■ — this also is well." But the right to say such a 
thing depends on continual reverence, and manifold 
sense of failure. If you have known yourself to have 
failed, you may trust, when it comes, the strange 
consciousness of success ; if you have faithfully loved 
the noble work of others, you need not fear to speak 
with respect of things duly done, of your own. 

136. But the principal good that comes of art's 
being followed in this reverent feeling, is vitally 
manifest in the associative conditions of it. Men 
who know their place, can take it and keep it, be it 
low or high, contentedly and firmly, neither yielding 
nor grasping ; and the harmony of hand and thought 



Athena in the Heart. 159 

follows, rendering all great deeds of art possible- 
deeds in which the souls of men meet like the jewels 
in the windows of Aladdin's palace, the little gems 
and the large all equally pure, needing no cement but 
the fitting of facets ; while the associative work of im- 
modest men is all jointless, and astir with wormy 
ambition ; putridly dissolute, and for ever on the 
crawl : so that if it come together for a time, it can 
only be by metamorphosis through flash of volcanic 
fire out of the vale of Siddim, vitrifying the clay of it, 
and fastening the slime, only to end in wilder scatter- 
ing ; according to the fate of those oldest, mightiest, 
immodestest of builders, of whom it is told in scorn, 
" They had brick for stone, and slime had they for 
mortar." 

137. The first function of Modesty, then, being 
this recognition of place, her second is the recognition 
of law, and delight in it, for the sake of law itself, 
whether her part be to assert it, or obey. For as it 
belongs to all immodesty to defy or deny law, and 
assert privilege and licence, according to its own 
pleasure (it being therefore rightly called "insolent" 
that is, " custom-breaking," violating some usual and 
appointed order to attain for itself greater forward- 
ness or power), so it is the habit of all modesty to 
love the constancy and " solemnity" or, literally, 
" accustomedness," of law, seeking first what are the 



160 The Queen of the Air. 

solemn, appointed, inviolable customs and general 
orders of nature, and of the Master of nature, touch- 
ing the matter in hand ; and striving to put itself, as 
habitually and inviolably, in compliance with them. 
Out of which habit, once established, arises what is 
rightly called " conscience," not " science " merely, 
but " with-science," a science "with us," such as only 
modest creatures can have — with or within them — 
and within all creation besides, every member of it, 
strong or weak, witnessing together, and joining in 
the happy consciousness that each one's work is good ; 
the bee also being profoundly of that opinion ; and 
the lark ; and the swallow, in that noisy, but modestly 
upside-down, Babel of hers, under the eaves, with its 
unvolcanic slime for mortar ; and the two ants who 
are asking of each other at the turn of that little 
ant's-foot-worn path through the moss, " lor via e lor 
fortuna;" and the builders also, who built yonder 
pile of cloud-marble in the west, and the gilder who 
gilded it, and is gone down behind it. 

138. But I think we shall better understand what 
we ought of the nature of Modesty, and of her opposite," 
by taking a simple instance of both, in the practice 
of that art of music which the wisest have agreed 
in thinking the first element of education ; only I 
must ask the reader's patience with me through a 
parenthesis. 



Athena in the Heart. 161 

Among the foremost men whose power has had 
to assert itself, though with conquest, yet with count- 
less loss, through peculiarly English disadvantages 
of circumstance, are assuredly to be ranked together, 
both for honour and for mourning, Thomas Bewick 
and George Cruikshank. There is, however, less cause 
for regret in the instance of Bewick. We may under- 
stand that it was^ well for us once to see what an 
entirely powerful painter's genius, and an entirely 
keen and true man's temper, could achieve, to- 
gether, unhelped, but also unharmed, among the 
black banks and wolds of Tyne. But the genius 
of Cruikshank has been cast away in an utterly 
ghastly and lamentable manner : his superb line- 
work, worthy of any class of subject, and his powers 
of conception and composition, of which I cannot 
venture to estimate the range in their degraded 
application, having been condemned, by his fate, 
to be spent either in rude jesting, or in vain war 
with conditions of vice too low alike for record or 
rebuke, among the dregs of the British populace. 
Yet perhaps I am wrong in regretting even this : 
it may be an appointed lesson for futurity, that the 
art of the best English etcher in the nineteenth 
century, spent on illustrations of the lives of burglars 
and drunkards, should one day be seen in museums 
beneath Greek vases fretted with drawings of the 

ii 



1 62 The Queen of the Air. 

wars of Troy, or side by side with Durer's " Knight 
and Death." 

139. Be that as it may, I am at present glad to 
be able to refer to one of these perpetuations, by his 
strong hand, of such human character as our faultless 
British constitution occasionally produces, in out-of- 
the-way corners. It is among his illustrations of the 
Irish Rebellion, and represents the pillage and destruc- 
tion of a gentleman's house by the mob. They have 
made a heap in the drawing-room of the furniture 
and books, to set first fire to ; and are tearing up 
the floor for its more easily kindled planks : the less 
busily-disposed meanwhile hacking round in rage, 
w r ith axes, and smashing what they can with butt- 
ends of guns. I do not care to follow with words the 
ghastly truth of the picture into its detail ; but the 
most expressive incident of the whole, and the one 
immediately to my purpose, is this, that one fellow 
has sat himself at the piano, on which, hitting down 
fiercely with his clenched fists, he plays, grinning, 
such tune as may be so producible, to which melody 
two of his companions, flourishing knotted sticks, 
dance, after their manner, on the top of the instru- 
ment. 

140. I think we have in this conception as perfect 
an instance as we require of the lowest supposable 
phase of immodest or licentious art in music ; the 



Athena in the Heart. 163 

" inner consciousness of good " being dim, even in the 
musician and his audience ; and wholly unsympathized 
with, and unacknowledged, by the Delphian, Vestal, 
and all other prophetic and cosmic powers. This re- 
presented scene came into my mind suddenly, one 
evening, a few weeks ago, in contrast with another 
which I was watching in its reality ; namely, a group 
of gentle school-girls, leaning over Mr. Charles Halle 
as he was playing a variation on " Home, sweet 
Home." They had sustained with unwonted courage 
the glance of subdued indignation with which, having 
just closed a rippling melody of Sebastian Bach's, 
(much like what one might fancy the singing of 
nightingales would be if they fed on honey instead of 
flies), he turned to the slight, popular air. But they 
had their own associations with it, and besought for, 
and obtained it ; and pressed close, at first, in vain, 
to see w T hat no glance could follow, the traversing of 
the fingers. They soon thought no more of seeing. 
The wet eyes, round-open, and the little scarlet upper 
lips, lifted, and drawn slightly together, in passionate 
glow of utter wonder, became picture-like, — porcelain- 
like, — in motionless joy, as the sweet multitude of low 
notes fell in their timely infinities, like summer rain. 
Only La Robbia himself (nor even he, unless with 
tenderer use of colour than is usual in his work) could 
have rendered some image of that listening. 



164 The Queen of the Air. 

141. But if the reader can give due vitality in his 
fancy to these two scenes, he will have in them repre- 
sentative types, clear enough for all future purpose, 
of the several agencies of debased and perfect art. 
And the interval may easily and continuously be 
filled by mediate gradations. Between the entirely 
immodest, unmeasured, and (in evil sense) unman- 
nered, execution with the fist ; and the entirely modest, 
measured, and (in the noblest sense) mannered, or 
moral'd, execution with the finger ; — between the im- 
patient and unpractised doing, containing in itself 
the witness of lasting impatience and idleness through 
all previous life, and the patient and practised doing, 
containing in itself the witness of self-restraint and 
unwearied toil through all previous life ; — between the 
expressed subject and sentiment of home violation, 
and the expressed subject and sentiment of home 
love ; — between the sympathy of audience, given in 
irreverent and contemptuous rage, joyless as the 
rabidness of a dog, and the sympathy of audience 
given in an almost appalled humility of intense, 
rapturous, and yet entirely reasoning and reasonable 
pleasure ;— between these two limits of octave, the 
reader will find he can class, according to its modesty, 
usefulness, and grace, or becomingness, all other musical 
art. For although purity of purpose and fineness of 
execution by no means go together, degree to degree, 



Athena in the Heart. 165 

(since fine, and indeed all but the finest, work is 
often spent in the most wanton purpose — as in all 
our modern opera — and the rudest execution is again 
often joined with purest purpose, as in a mother's song 
to her child), still the entire accomplishment of music 
is only in the union of both. For the difference between 
that " all but " finest and " finest " is an infinite one ; 
and besides this, however the power of the performer, 
once attained, may be afterwards misdirected, in 
slavery to popular passion or childishness, and spend 
itself, at its sweetest, in idle melodies, cold and 
ephemeral (like Michael Angelo's snow statue in the 
other art), or else in vicious difficulty and miserable 
noise — crackling of thorns under the pot of public 
sensuality — still, the attainment of this power, and 
the maintenance of it, involve always in the executant 
some virtue or courage of high kind ; the understand- 
ing of which, and of the difference between the disci- 
pline which develops it and the disorderly efforts of 
the amateur, it will be one of our first businesses to 
estimate rightly. And though not indeed by degree 
to degree, yet in essential relation (as of winds to 
waves, the one being always the true cause of the 
other, though they are not necessarily of equal force 
at the same time), we shall find vice in its varieties, 
with art-failure, — and virtue in its varieties, with art- 
success, — fall and rise together : the peasant-girl's song 



1 66 The Queen of the Air. 

at her spinning-wheel, the peasant-labourer's " to the 
oaks and rills," — domestic music, feebly yet sensi- 
tively skilful, — music for the multitude, of beneficent, 
or of traitorous power, — dance-melodies, pure and 
orderly, or foul and frantic, — march -music, blatant 
in mere fever of animal pugnacity, or majestic with 
force of national duty and memory, — song -music, 
reckless, sensual, sickly, slovenly, forgetful even of 
the foolish words it effaces with foolish noise, — or 
thoughtful, sacred, healthful, artful, for ever sancti- 
fying noble thought with separately distinguished 
loveliness of belonging sound, — all these families and 
gradations of good or evil, however mingled, follow, 
in so far as they are good, one constant law of virtue 
(or " life-strength," which is the literal meaning of the 
word, and its intended one, in wise men's mouths), 
and in so far as they are evil, are evil by outlawry 
and unvirtue, or death-weakness. Then, passing wholly 
beyond the domain of death, we may still imagine 
the ascendant nobleness of the art, through all the 
concordant life of incorrupt creatures, and a con- 
tinually deeper harmony of "puissant words and mur- 
murs made to bless," until we reach 

" The undisturbed song of pure consent, 
Aye sung before the sapphire-coloured throne.." 

142. And so far as the sister arts can be conceived 
to have place or office, their virtues are subject to a 



Athena in the Heart. 167 

law absolutely the same as that of music, only ex- 
tending its authority into more various conditions, 
owing to the introduction of a distinctly representa- 
tive and historical power, which acts under logical 
as well as mathematical restrictions, and is capable 
of endlessly changeful fault, fallacy, and defeat, as 
well as of endlessly manifold victory. 

143. Next to Modesty,, and her delight in mea- 
sures, let us reflect a little on the character of her 
adversary, the Goddess of Liberty, and her delight 
in absence of measures, or in false ones. It is true 
that there are liberties and liberties. Yonder torrent, 
crystal-clear, and arrow-swift, with its spray leaping 
into the air like white troops of fawns, is free enough. 
Lost, presently, amidst bankless, boundless marsh — 1 
soaking in slow shallowness, as it will, hither and 
thither, listless, among the poisonous reeds and unre- 
sisting slime — it is free also. We may choose which 
liberty we like, — the restraint of voiceful rock, or the 
dumb and edgeless shore of darkened sand. Of that 
evil liberty, which men are now glorifying, and pro- 
claiming as essence of gospel to all the earth, and 
will presently, I suppose, proclaim also to the stars, 
with invitation to them out of their courses, — and 
of its opposite continence, which is the clasp and 
ygvaiv\ 7rsp6vn of Aglaia's cestus, we must try to find 
out something true. For no quality of Art has been 



1 68 The Queen of the Air. 

more powerful in its influence on public mind ; none is 
more frequently the subject of popular praise, or the 
end of vulgar effort, than what we call "Freedom." 
It is necessary to determine the justice or injustice 
of this popular praise. 

144. I said, a little while ago, that the practical 
teaching of the masters of Art was summed by the 
O of Giotto. " You may judge my masterhood of 
craft," Giotto tells us, " by seeing that I can draw a 
circle unerringly." And we may safely believe him, 
understanding him to mean, that — though more may 
be necessary to an artist than such a power — at least 
this power is necessary. The qualities of hand and 
eye needful to do this are the first conditions of 
artistic craft. 

145. Try to draw a circle yourself with the "free " 
hand, and with a single line. You cannot do it if 
your hand trembles, nor if it hesitates, nor if it is 
unmanageable, nor if it is in the common sense of the 
word "free." So far from being free, it must be 
under a control as absolute and accurate as if it were 
fastened to an inflexible bar of steel. And yet it 
must move, under this necessary control, with perfect, 
untormented serenity of ease. 

146. That is the condition of all good work what- 
soever. All freedom is error. Every line you lay 
down is either right or wrong : it may be timidly and 



Athena in the Heart, 169 

awkwardly wrong, or fearlessly and impudently wrong : 
the aspect of the impudent wrongness is pleasurable 
to vulgar persons ; and is what they commonly call 
" free ,J execution : the timid, tottering, hesitating 
wrongness is rarely so attractive ; yet sometimes, if 
accompanied with good qualities, and right aims in 
other directions, it becomes in a manner charming, 
like the inarticulateness of a child : but, whatever 
the charm or manner of the error, there is but one 
question ultimately to be asked respecting every 
line you draw, Is it right or wrong ? If right, it 
most assuredly is not a " free " line, but an intensely 
continent, restrained, and considered line ; and the 
action of the hand in laying it is just as decisive, 
and just as "free" as the hand of a firstrate surgeon 
in a critical incision. A great operator told me that 
his hand could check itself within about the two- 
hundredth of an inch, in penetrating a membrane ; 
and this, of course, without the help of sight, by 
sensation only. With help of sight, and in action 
on a substance which does not quiver nor yield, a fine 
artist's line is measurable in its purposed direction to 
considerably less than the thousandth of an inch. 

A wide freedom, truly ! 

147. The conditions of popular art which most 
foster the common ideas about freedom, are merely 
results of irregularly energetic effort by men imper- 



1 70 The Queen of the Air. 

fectly educated ; these conditions being variously- 
mingled with cruder mannerisms resulting from 
timidity, or actual imperfection of body. Northern 
hands and eyes are, of course, never so subtle as 
Southern ; and in very cold countries, artistic execu- 
tion is palsied. The effort to break through this 
timidity, or to refine the bluntness, may lead to a 
licentious impetuosity, or an ostentatious minuteness. 
Every man's manner has this kind of relation to some 
defect in his physical powers or modes of thought ; 
so that in the greatest work there is no manner 
Visible. It is at first uninteresting from its quietness ; 
the majesty of restrained power only dawns gradually 
upon us, as we walk towards its horizon. 

There is, indeed, often great delightfulness in the 
innocent manners of artists who have real power and 
honesty, and draw, in this way or that, as best they 
can, under such and such untoward circumstances of 
life. But the greater part of the looseness, flimsiness, 
or audacity of modern work is the expression of an 
inner spirit of licence in mind and heart, connected, 
as I said, with the peculiar folly of this age, its hope 
of, and trust in, " liberty." Of which we must reason 
a little in more general terms. 

148. I believe we can nowhere find a better type 
of a perfectly free creature than in the common house 
fly. Nor free only, but brave ; and irreverent to a 



Athena in the Heart. 171 

degree which I think no human republican could by 
any philosophy exalt himself to. There is no courtesy 
in him ; he does not care whether it is king or clown 
whom he teases ; and in every step of his sw T ift me- 
chanical march, and in every pause of his resolute 
observation, there is one and the same expression 
of perfect egotism, perfect independence and self- 
confidence, and conviction of the world's having been 
made for flies. Strike at him with your hand ; and 
to him, the mechanical fact and external aspect of 
the matter is, what to you it would be, if an acre of 
red clay, ten feet thick, tore itself up from the ground 
in one massive field, hovered over you in the air for 
a second, and came crashing down with an aim. That 
is the external aspect of it ; the inner aspect, to his 
fly's mind, is of a quite natural and unimportant 
occurrence— one of the momentary conditions of his 
active life. He steps out of the way of your hand, 
and alights on the back of it. You cannot terrify 
him, nor govern him, nor persuade him, nor con- 
vince him. He has his own positive opinion on all 
matters ; not an unwise one, usually, for his own 
ends ; and will ask no advice of yours. He has no 
work to do — no tyrannical instinct to obey. The 
earthworm has his digging ; the bee her gathering 
and building ; the spider her cunning net-w r ork ; the 
ant her treasury and accounts. All these are com- 



172 The Queen of the Air. 

paratively slaves, or people of vulgar business. But 
your fly, free in the air, free in the chamber— a black 
incarnation of caprice — wandering, investigating, 
flitting, flirting, feasting at his will, with rich variety 
of choice in feast, from the heaped sweets in the 
grocer's window to those of the butcher's back-yard, 
and from the galled place on your cab-horse's back, 
to the brown spot in the road, from which, as the 
hoof disturbs him, he rises with angry republican 
buzz — what freedom is like his ? 

149. For captivity, again, perhaps your poor watch- 
dog is as sorrowful a type as you will easily find. 
Mine certainly is. The day is lovely, but I must write 
this, and cannot go out with him. He is chained in 
the yard, because I do not like dogs in rooms, and the 
gardener does not like dogs in gardens. He has no 
books, — nothing but his own weary thoughts for 
company, and a group of those free flies, whom he 
snaps at, with sullen ill success. Such dim hope as 
he may have that I may yet take him out with me, 
will be, hour by hour, wearily disappointed ; or, worse, 
darkened at once into a leaden despair by an authori- 
tative " No " — too well understood. His fidelity only 
seals his fate ; if he would not watch for me, he would 
be sent away, and go hunting with some happier 
master : but he watches, and is wise, and faithful, and 
miserable : and his high animal intellect only gives 



Athena in the Heai't. 173 

him the wistful powers of wonder, and sorrow, and 
desire, and affection, which embitter his captivity. 
Yet of the two, would we rather be watch-dog, or fly ? 

150. Indeed, the first point we have all to determine 
is not how free we are, but what kind of creatures we 
are. It is of small importance to any of us whether 
we get liberty ; but of the greatest that we deserve it. 
Whether we can win it, fate must determine ; but that 
we will be worthy of it, we may ourselves determine ; 
and the sorrowfullest fate, of all that we can suffer, is 
to have it, without deserving it. 

151, I have hardly patience to hold my pen and 
go on wanting, as I remember (I would that it were 
possible for a few consecutive instants to forget) the 
infinite follies of modern thought in this matter, centred 
in the notion that liberty is good for a man, irrespec- 
tively of the use he is likely to make of it. Folly 
unfathomable ! unspeakable ! unendurable to look in 
the full face of, as the laugh of a cretin. You will 
send your child, will you, into a room where the table 
is loaded with sweet wine and fruit — some poisoned, 
some not ?— you will say to him, " Choose freely, my 
little child ! It is so good for you to have freedom of 
choice : it forms your character— your individuality ! 
If you take the wrong cup, or the wrong berry, you 
will die before the day is over, but you will have 
acquired the dignity of a Free child ? " 



174 The Queen of the Air. 

152. You think that puts the case too sharply ? I 
tell you, lover of liberty, there is no choice offered to 
you, but it is similarly between life and death. There 
is no act, nor option of act, possible, but the wrong 
deed or option has poison in it which will stay in your 
veins thereafter for ever. Never more to all eternity 
can you be as you might have been, had you not done 
that — chosen that. You have " formed your charac- 
ter," forsooth ! No ; if you have chosen ill, you have 
De-formed it, and that for ever ! In some choices, it 
had been better for you that a red hot iron bar had 
struck -you aside, scarred and helpless, than that you 
had so chosen. " You will know better next time ! " 
No. Next time will never come. Next time the 
choice will be in quite another aspect— between quite 
different things, — you, weaker than you were by the 
evil into which you have fallen ; it, more doubtful than 
it was, by the increased dimness of your sight. No 
one ever gets wiser by doing wrong, nor stronger. 
You w T ill get wiser and stronger only by doing right, 
whether forced or not ; the prime, the one need is to 
do that, under whatever compulsion, till you can do it 
without compulsion. And then you are a Man. 

153. "What!" a wayward youth might perhaps 
answer, incredulously ; " no one ever gets wiser by 
doing wrong ? Shall I not know the world best by 
trying the wrong of it, and repenting ? Have I not, 



Athena in the Heart. 175 

even as it is, learned much by many of my errors ? " 
Indeed, the effort by which partially you recovered 
yourself was precious ; that part of your thought by 
which you discerned the error was precious. What 
wisdom and strength you kept, and rightly used, are 
rewarded ; and in the pain and the repentance, and 
in the acquaintance with the aspects of folly and sin, 
you have learned something ; how much less than 
you would have learned in right paths, can never be 
told, but that it is less is certain. Your liberty of 
choice has simply destroyed for you so much life and 
strength, never regainable. It is true you now know 
the habits of swine, and the taste of husks : do you 
think your father could not have taught you to know 
better habits and pleasanter tastes, if you had stayed 
in his house ; and that the knowledge you have lost 
would not have been more, as well as sweeter, than 
that you have gained? But "it so forms my in- 
dividuality to be free ! " Your individuality was 
given you by God, and in your race ; and if you have 
any to speak of, you will want no liberty. You will 
want a den to work in, and peace, and light — no 
more, — in absolute need ; if more, in anywise, it will 
still not be liberty, but direction, instruction, reproof, 
and sympathy. But if you have no individuality, if 
there is no true character nor true desire in you, then 
you will indeed w r ant to be free. You will begin 



176 The Queen of the Air. 

early ; and, as a boy, desire to be a man ; and, as a 
man, think yourself as good as every other. You will 
choose freely to eat, freely to drink, freely to stagger 
and fall, freely, at last, to curse yourself and die. 
Death is the only real freedom possible to us : and 
that is consummate freedom, — permission for every 
particle in the rotting body to leave its neighbour 
particle, and shift for itself. You call it " corrup- 
tion " in the flesh ; but before it comes to that, all 
liberty is an equal corruption in mind. You ask for 
freedom of thought ; but if you have not sufficient 
grounds for thought, you have no business to think ; 
and if you have sufficient grounds, you have no busi- 
ness to think wrong. Only one thought is possible 
to you, if you are wise- — your liberty is geometrically 
proportionate to your folly. 

154. " But all this glory and activity of our age ; 
what are they owing to, but to our freedom of 
thought ?"" In a measure, they are owing — what 
good is in them — to the discovery of many lies, and 
the escape from the power of evil. Not to liberty, 
but to the deliverance from evil or cruel masters. 
Brave men have dared to examine lies which had 
long been taught, not because they were free- thinkers, 
but because they were such stern and close thinkers 
that the lie could no longer escape them. Of course 
the restriction of thought, or of its expression, by 



Athena in the Heart. 177 

persecution, is merely a form of violence, justifiable 
or not, as other violence is, according to the character 
of the persons against whom it is exercised, and the 
divine and eternal laws which it vindicates or violates. 
We must not burn a man alive for saying that the 
Athanasian creed is ungrammatical, nor stop a 
bishop's salary because we are getting the worst of 
an argument with him ; neither must we let drunken 
men howl in the public streets at night. There is 
much that is true in the part of Mr. Mill's essay on 
Liberty which treats of freedom of thought ; some 
important truths are there beautifully expressed, but 
many, quite vital, are omitted ; and the balance, 
therefore, is wrongly struck. The liberty of expres- 
sion, with a great nation, would become like that in a 
well-educated company, in which there is indeed 
freedom of speech, but not of clamour ; or like that 
in an orderly senate, in which men who deserve to be 
heard, are heard in due time, and under determined 
restrictions. The degree of liberty you can rightly 
grant to a number of men is commonly in the inverse 
ratio of their desire for it ; and a general hush, or call 
to order, would be often very desirable in this England 
of ours. For the rest, of any good or evil extant, it is 
impossible to say what measure is owing to restraint, 
and what to licence, where the right is balanced 
between them. I was not a little provoked one day, 

12 



178 The Queen of the Air. 

a summer or two since, in Scotland, because the 
Duke of Athol hindered me from examining the 
gneiss and slate junctions in Glen Tilt, at the hour 
convenient to me : but I saw them at last, and in 
quietness ; and to the very restriction that annoyed 
me, owed, probably, the fact of their being in existence, 
instead of being blasted away by a mob-company; 
while the " free" paths and inlets of Loch Katrine and 
the Lake of Geneva are for ever trampled down and 
destroyed, not by one duke, but by tens of thousands 
of ignorant tyrants. 

155. So, a Dean and Chapter may, perhaps, un- 
justifiably charge me twopence for seeing a cathedral; 
— but your free mob pulls spire and all down about 
my ears, and I can see it no more for ever. And even 
if I cannot get up to the granite junctions in the glen, 
the stream comes down from them pure to the Garry ; 
but in Beddington Park I am stopped by the newly 
erected fence of a building speculator ; and the bright 
Wandel, divine of waters as Castaly, is filled by the 
free public with old shoes, obscene crockery, and ashes. 

156. In fine, the arguments for liberty may in 
general be summed in a few very simple forms, as 
follows : — 

Misguiding is mischievous : therefore guiding is. 
If the blind lead the blind, both fall into the ditch : 
therefore, nobody should lead anybody. 



Athena in the Heart. 179 

Lambs and fawns should be left free in the fields ; 
much more bears and wolves, 

If a man's gun and shot are his own, he may 
fire in any direction he pleases. 

A fence across a road is inconvenient ; much more 
one at the side of it 

Babes should not be swaddled with their hands 
bound down to their sides : therefore they should be 
thrown out to roll in the kennels naked. 

None of these arguments are good, and the prac- 
tical issues of them are worse. For there are certain 
eternal laws for human conduct which are quite clearly 
discernible by human reason. So far as these are 
discovered and obeyed, by whatever machinery or 
authority the obedience is procured, there follow life 
and strength. So far as they are disobeyed, by what- 
ever good intention the disobedience is brought about, 
there follow ruin and sorrow. And the first duty of 
every man in the world is to find his true master, 
and, for his own good, submit to him ; and to find his 
true inferior, and, for that inferior's good, conquer him. 
The punishment is sure, if we either refuse the rever- 
ence, or are too cowardly and indolent to enforce the 
compulsion. A base nation crucifies or poisons its 
wise men, and lets its fools rave and rot in its streets. 
A wise nation obeys the one, restrains the other, and 
cherishes all. 



180 The Queen of the Air. 

157. The best examples of the results of wise 
normal discipline in "Art will be found in whatever 
evidence remains respecting the lives of great Italian 
painters, though, unhappily, in eras of progress, but 
just in proportion to the admirableness and efficiency 
of the life, will be usually the scantiness of its history. 
The individualities and liberties which are causes of 
destruction may be recorded ; but the loyal conditions 
of daily breath are never told. Because Leonardo 
made models of machines, dug canals, built fortifica- 
tions, and dissipated half his art-power in capricious 
ingenuities, we have many anecdotes of him ; — but 
no picture of importance on canvas, and only a few 
withered stains of one upon a wall. But because his 
pupil, or reputed pupil, Luini, laboured in constant 
and successful simplicity, we have no anecdotes of 
him ; — only hundreds of noble works. Luini is, 
perhaps, the best central type of the highly-trained 
Italian painter. He is the only man who entirely 
united the religious temper which w r as the spirit-life 
of art, with the physical power which was its bodily 
life. He joins the purity and passion of Angelico to 
the strength of Veronese : the two elements, poised 
in perfect balance, are so calmed and restrained, 
each by the other, that most of us lose the sense of 
both. The artist does not see the strength, by reason 
of the chastened spirit in which it is used ; and the 



Athena, in the Heart. 181 

religious visionary does not recognize the passion, 
by reason of the frank human truth with which it 
is rendered. He is a man ten times greater than 
Leonardo ; — a mighty colourist, while Leonardo was 
only a fine draughtsman in black, staining the chiaro- 
scuro drawing, like a coloured print : he perceived 
and rendered the delicatest types of human beauty 
that have been painted since the days of the 
Greeks, while Leonardo depraved his finer instincts 
by caricature, and remained to the end of his days 
the slave of an archaic smile : and he is a designer as 
frank, instinctive, and exhaustless as Tintoret, while 
Leonardo's design is only an agony of science, admired 
chiefly because it is painful, and capable of analysis 
in its best accomplishment. Luini has left nothing 
behind him that is not lovely ; but of his life I believe 
hardly anything is known beyond remnants of tradi- 
tion which murmur about Lugano and Saronno, and 
which remain ungleaned. This only is certain, that he 
was born in the loveliest district of North Italy, where 
hills, and streams, and air, meet in softest harmonies. 
Child of the Alps, and of their divinest lake, he is 
taught, without doubt or dismay, a lofty religious 
creed, and a sufficient law of life, and of its mechanical 
arts. Whether lessoned by Leonardo himself, or 
merely one of many, disciplined in the system of the 
Milanese school, he learns unerringly to draw, un- 



1 82 The Queen of the Air. 

erringly and enduringly to paint His tasks are set 
him without question day by day, by men who are 
justly satisfied with his work, and who accept it with- 
out any harmful praise, or senseless blame. Place, 
scale, and subject are determined for him on the 
cloister wall or the church dome ; as he is required, 
and for sufficient daily bread, and little more, he paints 
what he has been taught to design wisely, and has 
passion to realize gloriously : every touch he lays is 
eternal, every thought he conceives is beautiful and 
pure : his hand moves always in radiance of blessing ; 
from day to day his life enlarges in power and peace ; 
it passes away cloudlessly, the starry twilight remain- 
ing arched far against the night? 

158. Oppose to such a life as this that of a great 
painter amidst the elements of modern English liberty, 
Take the life of Turner, in whom the artistic energy 
and inherent love of beauty were at least as strong as 
in Luini : but, amidst the disorder and ghastliness of 
the lower streets of London, his instincts in early 
infancy were warped into toleration of evil, or even 
into delight in it. He gathers what he can of instruc- 
tion by questioning and prying among half-informed 
masters ; spells out some knowledge of classical 
fable ; educates himself, by an admirable force, to 
the production of wildly majestic or pathetically 
tender and pure pictures, by which he cannot live. 



Athena in the Heart. 183 

There is no one to judge them, or to command him : 
only some of the English upper classes hire him to 
paint their houses and parks, and destroy the draw- 
ings afterwards by the most wanton neglect. Tired 
of labouring carefully, without either reward or praise, 
he dashes out into various experimental and popular 
works — makes himself the servant of the lower public, 
and is dragged hither and thither at their will ; w T hile 
yet, helpless and guideless, he indulges his idiosyn- 
cracies till they change into insanities ; the strength 
of his soul increasing its sufferings, and giving force 
to its errors ; all the purpose of life degenerating into 
instinct ; and the web of his work wrought, at last, of 
beauties too subtle to be understood, his liberty, with 
vices too singular to be forgiven — all useless, because 
magnificent idiosyncracy had become solitude, or con- 
tention, in the midst of a reckless populace, instead 
of submitting itself in* loyal harmony to the Art-laws 
of an understanding nation. And the life passed away 
in darkness ; and its final work, in all the best beauty 
of it, has already perished, only enough remaining to 
teach us what we have lost. 

159. These are the opposite effects of Law and of 
Liberty on men of the highest powers. In the case 
of inferiors the contrast is still more fatal ; under 
strict law, they become the subordinate workers in 
great schools, healthily aiding, echoing, or supplying, 



184 The Queen of the Air. 

with multitudinous force of hand, the mind of the 
leading masters : they are the nameless carvers of* 
great architecture — stainers of glass — hammerers of 
iron — helpful scholars, whose work ranks round, if not 
with, their master's, and never disgraces it. But the 
inferiors under a system of licence for the most part 
perish in miserable effort ; * a few struggle into per- 

* As I correct this sheet for press, my Pall Mall Gazette of last 
Saturday, April 17th, is lying on the table by me. I print a few lines out 
of it :— 

4 ' An Artist's Death. — A sad story was told at an inquest held 
in St. Pancras last night by Dr. Lankester on the body of * * *, aged 
fifty-nine, a French artist, who was found dead in his bed at his rooms 
ia * * ■"* Street. M. * * *, also an artist, said he had known the 
deceased for fifteen years. He once held a high position, and being 
anxious to make a name in the world, he five years ago commenced a 
large picture, which he hoped, when completed, to have in the gallery at 
Versailles ; and with that view he sent a photograph of it to the French 
Emperor. He also had an idea of sending it to the English Royal 
Academy. He laboured on this picture, neglecting other work which 
would have paid him well, and gradually sank lower and lower into 
poverty. His friends assisted him, but *being absorbed in his great 
work, he did not heed their advice, and they left him. He was, how- 
ever, assisted by the French Ambassador, and last Saturday he (the 
witness) saw deceased, who was much depressed in spirits, as he ex- 
pected the brokers to be put in possession for rent. He said his troubles 
were so great that he feared his brain would give way. The witness 
gave him a shilling, for which he appeared very thankful. On Monday 
the witness called upon him, but received no answer to his knock. He 
went again on Tuesday, and entered the deceased's bedroom and found 
him dead. Dr. George Ross said that when called in to the deceased 
he had been dead at least two days. The room was in a filthy dirty 
condition, and the picture referred to — certainly a very fine one — was in 
that room. The post-mortem examination shewed that the cause of 
death was fatty degeneration of the heart, the latter probably having 
ceased its action through the mental excitement of the deceased." 



Athena in the Heart. 185 

nicious eminence — harmful alike to themselves and to 
all who admire them ; many die of starvation ; many 
insane, either in weakness of insolent egotism, like 
Haydon, or in a conscientious agony of beautiful 
purpose and warped power, like Blake. There is no 
probability of the persistence of a licentious school in 
any good accidentally discovered by them ; there is 
an approximate certainty of their gathering, with 
acclaim, round any shadow of evil, and following it 
to whatever quarter of destruction it may lead. 

160. Thus far the notes on Freedom. Now, lastly, 
here is some talk which I tried at the time to make 
intelligible ; and with which I close this volume, 
because it will serve sufficiently to express the 
practical relation in which I think the art and imagi- 
nation of the Greeks stand to our own ; and will 
show the reader that my view of that relation is 
unchanged, from the first day on which I began to 
write, until now. 

The Hercules of Camarina. 

Address to the Students of the Art School of South Lambeth, 
March i$th, 1869. 

161. AMONG the photographs of Greek coins which 
present so many admirable subjects for your study, 
I must speak for the present of one only : the 
Hercules of Camarina. You have, represented by 



t86 The Qtieen of the Air. 

a Greek workman, in that coin, the face of a man, 
and the skin of a lion's head. And the man's face 
is like a man's face, but the lion's skin is not like 
a lion's skin. 

162. Now there are some people who will tell you 
that Greek art is fine, because it is true ; and because 
it carves men's faces as like men's faces as it can. 

And there are other people who will tell you 
that Greek art is fine because it is not true ; and 
carves a lion's skin so as to look not at all like a 
lion's skin. 

And you fancy that one or other of these sets of 
people must be wrong, and are perhaps much puzzled 
to find out which you should believe. 

But neither of them are wrong, and you will have 
eventually to believe, or rather to understand and 
know, in reconciliation, the truths taught by each ; — 
but for the present, the teachers of the first group are 
those you must follow. 

It is they who tell you the deepest and usefullest 
truth, which involves all others in time. Greek art, 
and all other art, is fine when it makes a man's face 
as like a maris face as it cart. Hold to that All 
kinds of nonsense are talked to you, now-a-days, 
ingeniously and irrelevantly about art. Therefore, 
for the most part of the day, shut your ears, and 
keep your eyes open : and understand primarily, 



Athena in the Heart, 187 

what you may, I fancy, understand easily, that the 
greatest masters of all greatest schools — Phidias, 
Donatello, Titian, Velasquez, or Sir Joshua Reynolds 
— all tried to make human creatures as like human 
creatures as they could ; and that anything less 
like humanity than their work, is not so good as 
theirs. 

Get that w T ell driven into your heads ; and don't 
let it out again, at your peril. 

163. Having got it well in, you may then farther 
understand, safely, that there is a great deal of 
secondary work in pots, and pans, and floors, and 
carpets, and shawls, and architectural ornament, 
which ought, essentially, to be tinlike reality, and 
to depend for its charm on quite other qualities 
than imitative ones. But all such art is inferior 
and secondary — much of it more or less instinctive 
and animal, and a civilized human creature can only 
learn its principles rightly, by knowing those of great 
civilized art first — which is always the representation, 
to the utmost of its power of whatever it has got to 
show — made to look as like the thing as possible, 
Go into the National Gallery, and look at the foot of 
Correggio's Venus there. Correggio made it as like 
a foot as he could, and you won't easily find any- 
thing liker. Now, you will find on any Greek vase 
something meant for a foot, or a hand, w T hich is not 



188 The Queen of the Air. 

at all like one. The Greek vase is a good thing in 
its way, but Correggio's picture is the best work. 

164. So, again, go into the Turner room of the 
National Gallery, and look at Turner's drawing of 
" Ivy Bridge." You will find the water in it is like 
real water, and the ducks in it are like real ducks. 
Then go into the British Museum, and look for an 
Egyptian landscape, and you will find the water in 
that constituted of blue zigzags, not at all like water ; 
and ducks in the middle of it made of red lines, 
looking not in the least as if they could stand stuffing 
with sage and onions. They, are very good in their 
way, but Turner's are better. 

165. I will not pause to fence my general principle 
against what you perfectly well know of the due con- 
tradiction, — that a thing may be painted very like, yet 
painted ill. Rest content with knowing that it must 
be like, if it is painted well ; and take this farther 
general law : — Imitation is like charity. When it is 
done for love, it is lovely ; when it is done for show, 
hateful. 

166. Well, then, this Greek coin is fine, first, be- 
cause the face is like a face. Perhaps you think there 
is something particularly handsome in the face, which 
you can't see in the photograph, or can't at present 
appreciate. But there is nothing of the kind. It is a 
very regular, quiet, commonplace sort of face ; and 



Athena in the Heart, 189 

any average English gentleman's, of good descent, 
would be far handsomer. 

167. Fix that in your heads also, therefore, that 
Greek faces are not particularly beautiful. Of the 
much nonsense against which you are to keep your 
ears shut, that which is talked to you of the Greek 
ideal of beauty, is among the absolutest. There is 
not a single instance of a very beautiful head left by 
the highest school of Greek art. On coins, there is 
even no approximately beautiful one. The Juno of 
Argos is a virago ; the Athena of Athens grotesque ; 
the Athena of Corinth is insipid ; and of Thurium, 
sensual. The Siren Ligeia, and fountain of Arethusa, 
on the coins of Terina and Syracuse, are prettier, but 
totally without expression, and chiefly set off by their 
well-curled hair. You might have expected some- 
thing subtle in Mercuries ; but the Mercury of ^Enus 
is a very stupid-looking fellow, in a cap like a bowl, 
with a knob on the top of it. The Bacchus of Thasos 
is a drayman with his hair pomatum'd. The Jupiter 
of Syracuse is, however, calm and refined ; and the 
Apollo of Clazomenae would have been impressive, 
if he had not come down to us much flattened by 
friction. But on the whole, the merit of Greek coins 
does not primarily depend on beauty of features, nor 
even, in the period of highest art, that of the statues. 
You may take the Venus of Melos as a standard of 



190 The Queen of the Air. 

beauty of the central Greek type. She has tranquil, 
regular, and lofty features ; but could not hold her 
own for a moment against the beauty of a simple 
English girl, of pure race and kind heart. 

1 68, And the reason that Greek art, on the whole, 
bores you, (and you know it does,) is that you are 
always forced to look in it for something that is not 
there ; but which may be seen every day, in real 
life, all round you ; and which you are naturally 
disposed to delight in, and ought to delight in. For 
the Greek race was not at all one of exalted beauty, 
but only of general and healthy completeness of form. 
They were only, and could be only, beautiful in body 
to the degree that they were beautiful in soul ; (for 
you will find, when you read deeply into the matter, 
that the body is only the soul made visible). And 
the Greeks were indeed very good people, much better 
people than most of us think, or than many of us are ; 
but there are better people alive now than the best of 
them, and lovelier people to be seen now, than the 
loveliest of them. 

169. Then, what are the merits of this Greek art, 
which make it so exemplary for you ? Well, not 
that it is beautiful, but that it is Right* All that it 
desires to do, it does, and all that it does, does well. 
You will find, as you advance in the knowledge of 

* Compare above, §101. 



Athena in the Heart. 191 

art, that its laws of self-restraint are very marvellous ; 
that its peace of heart, and contentment in doing a 
simple thing, with only one or two qualities, restrictedly 
desired, and sufficiently attained, are a most whole- 
some element of education for you, as opposed to the 
wild writhing, and wrestling, and longing for the 
moon, and tilting at windmills, and agony of eyes, 
and torturing of fingers, and general spinning out of 
one's soul into fiddlestrings, which constitute the ideal 
life of a modern artist. 

Also observe, there is entire masterhood of its 
business up to the required point. A Greek does not 
. reach after other people's strength, nor out-reach his 
own. He never tries to paint before he can draw ; 
he never tries to lay on flesh where there are no 
bones ; and he never expects to find the bones of 
anything in his inner consciousness. Those are his 
first merits — sincere and innocent purpose, strong 
common sense and principle, and all the strength 
that comes of these, and all the grace that follows on 
that strength. 

170. But, secondly, Greek art is always exemplary 
in disposition of masses, which is a thing that in 
modern days students rarely look for, artists not 
enough, and the public never. But, whatever else 
Greek work may fail of, you may be always sure its 
masses are well placed, and their placing has been 



192 The Queen of the Air. 

the object of the most subtle care. Look, for instance, 
at the inscription in front of this Hercules of the 
name of the town — Camarina. You can't read it, 
even though you may know Greek, without some 
pains ; for the sculptor knew well enough that it 
mattered very little whether you read it or not, for 
the Camarina Hercules could tell his own story ; but 
what did above all things matter was, that no K or 
A or M should come in a wrong place with respect 
to the outline of the head, and divert the eye from it, 
or spoil any of its lines. So the whole inscription is 
thrown into a sweeping curve of gradually diminishing 
size, continuing from the lion's paws, round the neck, 
up to the forehead, and answering a decorative pur- 
pose as completely as the curls of the mane opposite. 
Of these, again, you cannot change or displace one 
without mischief : they are almost as even in reticula- 
tion as a piece of basket-work ; but each has a different 
form and a due relation to the rest, and if you set to 
work to draw that mane rightly, you will find that, 
whatever time you give to it, you can't get the tresses 
quite into their places, and that every tress out of its 
place does an injury. If you want to test your powers 
of accurate drawing, you may make that lion's mane 
your pons asinonim. I have never yet met with a 
student who didn't make an ass in a lion's skin of 
himself, when he tried it. 



Athena in the Heart. 193 

171. Granted, however, that these tresses may be 
finely placed, still they are not like a lion's mane. 
So we come back to the question, — if the face is to 
be like a man's face, why is not the lion's mane to be 
like a lion's mane ? Well, because it can't be like a 
lion's mane without too much trouble ; — and incon- 
venience after that, and poor success, after all. Too 
much trouble, in cutting the die into fine fringes and 
jags ; inconvenience after that, — because fringes and- 
jags would spoil the surface of a coin ; poor success 
after all, — because, though you can easily stamp 
cheeks and foreheads smooth at a blow, you can't 
stamp projecting tresses fine at a blow, whatever pains 
you take with your die. 

So your Greek uses his common sense, wastes 
no time, loses no skill, and says to you, " Here are 
beautifully set tresses, which I have carefully designed 
and easily stamped. Enjoy them ; and if you cannot 
understand that they mean lion's mane, heaven mend 
your wits." 

172. See then, you have in this work, well-founded 
knowledge, simple and right aims, thorough mastery 
of handicraft, splendid invention in arrangement, 
unerring common sense in treatment, — merits, these, 
I think, exemplary enough to justify our tormenting 
you a little with Greek Art. But it has one merit 
more than these, the greatest of all. It always means 

13 



194 The Queen of the Air. 

something worth saying. Not merely worth saying 
for that time only, but for all time. What do you' 
think this helmet of lion's hide is always given to 
Hercules for ? You can't suppose it means only that 
he once killed a lion, and always carried its skin 
afterwards to show that he had, as Indian sportsmen 
send home stuffed rugs, with claws at the corners, and 
a lump in the middle which one tumbles over every 
time one stirs the fire. What was this Nemean Lion, 
whose spoils were evermore to cover Hercules from 
the cold ? Not merely a large specimen of Felis Leo, 
ranging the fields of Nemea, be sure of that. This 
Nemean cub was one of a bad litter. Born of Typhon 
and Echidna, — of the whirlwind and the snake, — 
Cerberus his brother, the Hydra of Lerna his sister, 
— it must have been difficult to get his hide off him. 
He had to be found in darkness too, and dealt upon 
without weapons, by grip at the throat— arrows and 
club of no avail against him. What does all that mean ? 
173. It means that the Nemean Lion is the first 
great adversary of life, whatever that may be — to 
Hercules, or to any of us, then or now. The first 
monster we have to strangle, or be destroyed by, 
fighting in the dark, and with none to help us, only 
Athena standing by, to encourage with her smile. 
Every man's Nemean Lion lies in wait for him some- 
where. The slothful man says, there is a lion in the 



Athena in the Heart. 195 

path. He says well. The quite //^slothful man says 
the same, and knows it too. But they differ in their 
farther reading of the text. The slothful man says 
/ shall be slain, and the unslothful, IT shall be. It 
is the first ugly and strong enemy that rises against 
us, all future victory depending on victory over that. 
Kill it ; and through all the rest of life, what was once 
dreadful is your armour, and you are clothed w T ith 
that conquest for every other, and helmed with its 
crest of fortitude for evermore. 

Alas, we have most of us to walk bare-headed ; 
but that is the meaning of the story of Nemea, — 
worth laying to heart and thinking of, sometimes, 
when you see a dish garnished with parsley, which 
was the crown at the Nemean games. 

174. How far, then, have we got, in our list of the 
merits of Greek art now ? 

Sound knowledge. 

Simple aims. 

Mastered craft. 

Vivid invention. 

Strong common sense. 

And eternally true and wise meaning. 

Are these not enough ? Here is one more then, 
which will find favour, I should think, with the British 
Lion. Greek art is never frightened at anything, it is 
always cool. 



196 The Queen of the Air. 

175. It differs essentially from all other art, past 
or present, in this incapability of being frightened. 
Half the power and imagination of every other school 
depend on a certain feverish terror mingling with 
their sense of beauty ; — the feeling that a child has in 
a dark room, or a sick person in seeing ugly dreams. 
But the Greeks never have ugly dreams. They can- 
not draw anything ugly when they try. Sometimes 
they put themselves to their wits'-end to draw an ugly 
thing, — the Medusa's head, for instance, — but they 
can't do it,— not they,- — because nothing frightens 
them. They widen the mouth, and grind the teeth, 
and puff the cheeks, and set the eyes a-goggling ; 
and the thing is only ridiculous after all, not the least 
dreadful, for there is no dread in their hearts. Pen- 
siveness ; amazement ; often deepest grief and deso- 
lateness. All these ; but terror never. Everlasting 
calm in the presence of all fate ; and joy such as 
they could win, not indeed in a perfect beauty, but in 
beauty at perfect rest ! A kind of art this, surely, to 
be looked at, and thought upon sometimes with profit, 
even in these latter days. 

176, To be looked at sometimes. Not continually, 
and never as a model for imitation. For you are not 
Greeks ; but, for better or worse, English creatures ; 
and cannot do, even if it were a thousand times better 
worth doing, anything well, except what your English 



Athena in the Heart. 197 

hearts shall prompt, and your English skies teach you. 
For all good art is the natural utterance of its own 
people in its own day. 

But also, your own art is a better and brighter 
one than ever this Greek art was. Many motives, 
powers, and insights have been added to those elder 
ones, The very corruptions into which we have fallen 
are signs of a subtle life, higher than theirs was, and 
therefore more fearful in its faults and death. Chris- 
tianity has neither superseded, nor, by itself, excelled 
heathenism ; but it has added its own good, won also 
by many a Nemean contest in dark valleys, to all 
that was good and noble in heathenism : and our 
present thoughts and work, when they are right, are 
nobler than the heathen's. And we are not reverent 
enough to them, because we possess too much of 
them. That sketch of four cherub heads from an 
English girl, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, at Kensington, 
is an incomparably finer thing than ever the Greeks 
did. Ineffably tender in the touch, yet Herculean 
in power ; innocent, yet exalted in feeling ; pure in 
colour as a pearl ; reserved and decisive in design, as 
this Lion crest,— if it alone existed of such, — if it 
were a picture by Zeuxis, the only one left in the 
world, and you built a shrine for it, and were allowed 
to see it only seven days in a year, it alone would 
teach you all of art that you ever needed to know, 



198 The Queen of the Air. 

But you do not learn from this or any other such 
work, because you have not reverence enough for 
them, and are trying to learn from all at once, and 
from a hundred other masters besides. 

177. Here, then, is the practical advice which I 
would venture to deduce from what I have tried to 
show you. Use Greek art as a first, not a final, 
teacher. Learn to draw carefully from Greek work ; 
above all, to place forms correctly, and to use light 
and shade tenderly. Never allow yourselves black 
shadows. It is easy to make things look round and 
projecting ; but the things to exercise yourselves in 
are the placing of the masses, and the modelling of 
the lights. It is an admirable exercise to take a pale 
wash of colour for all the shadows, never reinforcing 
it everywhere, but drawing the statue as if it were in 
far distance, making all the darks one flat pale tint. 
Then model from those into the lights, rounding as 
well as you can, on those subtle conditions. In your 
chalk drawings, separate the lights from the darks at 
once all over ; then reinforce the darks slightly where 
absolutely necessary, and put your whole strength 
on the lights and their limits. Then, when you have 
learned to draw thoroughly, take one master for your 
painting, as you would have done necessarily in old 
times by being put into his school (were I to choose 
for you, it should be among six men only— Titian, 



Athena in the Heart. 199 

Correggio, Paul Veronese, Velasquez, Reynolds, or 
Holbein. If you are a landscapist, Turner must be 
your only guide, for no other great landscape painter 
has yet lived) ; and having chosen, do your best to 
understand your own chosen master, and obey him> 
and no one else, till you have strength to deal with 
the nature itself round you, and then, be your own 
master and see with your own eyes. If you have 
got masterhood or sight in you, that is the way to 
make the most of them ; and if you have neither, 
you w T ill at least be sound in your work, prevented 
from immodest and useless effort, and protected from 
vulgar and fantastic error, 

And so I wish you all, good speed, and the favour 
of Hercules and of the Muses; -and to those who 
shall best deserve them, the crown of Parsley first, 
and then of the Laurel. 



THE END. 



LONDON : 

PRINTED BY SMITH, ELDER AND CO-, 

OLD BAILEY, E.C. 



, 



7* 



- 

<- 
c 


fc"<<CL~ 


C C< 




<LlCjC 



!§5£E$ 



gCMLCCM 



«m sci<ir- ...cfcci. ^r/<H 

<£T<&'4C£;4C «sk- ■«!. -<c, xatL <i 

«^«T«ri«^cl«^ XC. .<3£Z ' 
c etffOCL «C ><^i<T 

m<c«: ..: <c; ; <38SCT • 

> ^<-<lC>^<^lC «SC... "<oI<<8? ,— 

i ■ «&; <cj«c c^^sc ?agp;_ <i . -<c < 

i m^9^<^ c ' c ■■ ■ ■ . ^.-'..<s 

< ^<3cc: =cc,.< c ■■-<-? '-. r I or, 
^ •-. «£_ OCX 1 «to <~- C: • **■ - C5- ■ cr. 

: <*-<:- . < esc c cr*. .. .<#.■<- 

• -cc <oc/C : ceiled ^EE/; ccc: 
c< <^C7C c<SSp^ ^ciLl 

^c c^cr<3cr:c c «£■*:; ccc: 



t etc 

c <c<: 

cr 
' -c<c-c 
cc 

CC 

cc 



czLcr 



cc: cc ^ 

<XlI C c" .'<'■■ . 
OGC c — 

^ C C <c> 

ci •• c <^v<r3«r" 
•^•.C C - t :. ; 

c a 

^ C;C:^ 



"^ c" ci ; <■■■ • 

St"Cl <jl- ^CJCI 

cICjC c: ■- c* 



c c 

^ CI ci 



o- 


■ ;.-< 


< 


cc 


<c 


<^c 


<^2__ 


gl i 


, < < 


<&. «~ 


< o 


c:^ 




:-VC^ 


CC 


<l •:■ 


<3C 


*c§ 


vl 


Scl 


<c 


cC 


CC 




jj * 


c 






c<c 


^ci 




ti i <. 


c^ 


<c 


'-.'■< 


'^Zj 


I 


< 


CC 


en 


<< 


^^~ 


^.■* 


-■ or 


CC 


cc 


^ <: 


^^ 


"■ 


" •■>-<. 


Cc . 


<Ci 


c 


^T" 


!_-_ 


« c 


c< 


<ss 


•• C. II« 


"41 


CT : ' 


C 


<c 


<C1J 

<3C 


'-' i 








i C 
4 


cCl 

cc: 


41 


■ <cM 


ss ^"". : . 


c 


CC 


^:: 


• « 



c ■ < 






^srae 



*"'"**■ -"'•' 




varacr 


cl"< 


V-^'T- 




JKE? 


< 


<T 




«sglcr « 


' <; 


CjC 




OCKT 


<^ 


d< 




^cic «? 


<< 


C3g 






<2 


^z^_ 




ccce' 


^~- 


^Z^_- 




cc.;Cf .". 




| ,^C1 


< 


< £X^ c£ 


- ^ 


| ^f= 


s 


-:; ccrv 


*c 



^«Z'i 


^xrc. 




cie::: 


<C Ci 


' ■ n 


^<c 


C<7 


«g 


<<-:: 


<<C^ 


: : 4| 


<- -<■; 


cr <- 


^ 


c.C 






< -: ■<; 


<isc" 


^ 


^<^ 


; <s<r: 


<: 


=--.. ^.cr 


«?'<" 


^ 


C'_- CL < 


s- c- c 


^ 


C -^.<*r 


S, CC. 


^c 


^ r <r 


c< 




<: < 


' . < ( . 


^^s 



<3t C 

'■CT*C ': 






crc ; - < 



